Microtones have played an active role in rock since Sonic Youth first appeared in the early ‘80s. Musicians often turn to microtones when they want a certain effect, for example, the “honky-tonk” piano sound, which can be found in the Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon” among other places. The famous guitar solo in “Hotel California” features a wonderful descending microtonal passage. Acoustic artists like Fat Knuckle Freddy use microtones to play pitches accurately as they occur in nature and to transcend the inherent limitations of fixed tuning systems. The results are jarring and uncomfortable, but that’s possibly their intention. They explore new tonal relationships and tones that vibrate in unusual ways. It could also be used in any genre.ĮDM artist Sevish and the metal band Cryptic Ruse use microtones to get weird. Microtonal music can sound calm or it can sound otherworldly, depending on the tuning used as well as the musician. They are building new instruments, developing new systems of notation, and writing new music. For the last 50 years or so, composers and performers have been exploring ways to play microtones. Most probably aren’t even aware that they use them until recently. Most artists play them by feel and don’t use a system or formal notation. However, microtonal blues-based embellishments, also known as “blue notes”, are intuitive. With digital synths and VSTs, it’s much easier now to re-tune on the go.
However, playing different tunings on a mechanical keyboard requires completely re-tuning the instrument for every key change. A talented musician could easily re-tune into different microtonal systems on a fretless instrument like a violin, or a slide instrument like the trombone or slide guitar. Guitars and saxophones can be used to bend notes and play pitches that don’t exist on a piano. The blues and every genre derived from the blues (almost every popular style) are immersed in microtonal inflections and embellishments. Well-known Western composers who incorporated microtonal material in their music included Charles Ives, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Benjamin Johnston, Henk Badings, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Krzysztof Penderecki. Among them the Czech composer Alois Hába wrote many pieces, including operas, using quarter-tone and sixth-tone scales he designed instruments to play the music, and he established a department of microtonal music at the Prague Conservatory. Influenced by European tuning systems used before 1700 and by non-Western music, there were numerous composers in Europe and North America who began to experiment with microtonal structures soon after 1900. While the term might suggest that it is not the norm, in fact, most of the world’s music uses intervals greater or smaller than 100 cents. Microtonality, in essence, uses tones that exist between the notes of the 12-note, equal-temperament scale that is used in most Western music. It is these in-between notes, the ones that are in between the standard tones, that are called microtones.
Taking this example further, even though a piano keyboard indicates a fixed arrangement of standard pitches, our ears can actually discern another 20 pitches or so between each of the keys. It was after this that artists in Western music began to rely on a set of fixed pitches spaced at equidistant intervals, as the keys on a piano. The tuning system used most commonly in Western music dates back to 1917 according to some academics, with the publication of William Braid White’s Modern Piano Tuning and Allied Arts. This varies from culture to culture and changes over time. In contemporary music, while it appears that there is a standardized system of tuning, in reality, the manner in which an instrument is tuned or even whether it is considered to be “in tune” is not objective or universal.
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