Microtones, tuning, xenharmonic music

Do we need a topic for people working outside 12-note equal temperament? Maybe?

Anyway, here’s a Python script I’ve been working on.

With this script you can:

  • Search for equal divisions and linear tunings that are optimal for approximating a given set of intervals.
  • Specify the period and, for linear scales, the generator.
  • Score each scale by the root mean square (RMS) error, average absolute error, or maximum absolute error.
  • Show all scales in a range of lengths, or limit to:
    • Ones whose score improves on any of shorter length
    • Ones whose score lies below some threshold
    • Both.
  • Investigate what Carlos calls scales with a fractional number of steps to the octave.

Example output:

image

It’s here (and yeah, I’m trying out gitlab instead of Microsoft’s github)

https://gitlab.com/rsholmes/bestintervals.py

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