What you can do with the Justonic Pitch Palette tuning software, and why
Music evolves with the spirit of the times, with technology, and with the skill and knowledge of musicians. The greatest changes in music today are fueled by technology and by the access to international and historical influences. Modern technology is revolutionizing musical instruments. We are on the threshold of a new era of music in which a whole world of varied musical traditions, the vast sonic resources of modern instruments, and the power of computer software combine to help us create new music unheard or unimagined ever before.
The Justonic software is one piece - an important piece, we believe - in this new music. Why? Because the Justonic software unlocks two very important musical parameters that have been restricted by the mechanical technology of past centuries:
1. Intonation flexibility, the ability to microtune notes in real time, and
2. Scale flexibility, the choice of historic, international, or original scales.
For the past 300 years most western music has been composed and performed in one scale, and that scale is out of tune!
Every musical third played on a modern piano or guitar is sharp of the natural harmonics of the strings. Every minor third is flat. The fifths are flat. The major and minor sevenths are sharp. The figure below shows how much the equal tempered scale deviates from one of the most natural harmonic scales. Although there is nothing in the nature of music that requires a musician to always tune to pure harmonics, the mistunings of the equal tempered scale are arbitrary and random. They were not devised by the ear of any musician, but were rather plotted by seventeenth century mathematicians devising a simple means of building pianos. They certainly helped to make piano construction simple, and helped simplify the playing of music, but they sacrificed the pure sound of true harmony.
The graph below shows how the equal tempered scale is out of tune with the pure harmonic intervals. The "Harmonic Classic," scale is used for comparison. This is scale #1 on the Pitch Palette scale menu. Notice how sharp the minor-Seventh is in equal temperament, completely obliterating any relationship to the seventh harmonic.
You will notice that the harmonic scale is written as a series of ratios (5:4, 4:3, etc.) This is because pure harmonic musical intervals are relationships of "whole-number frequencies. A pure harmonic musical "Fifth," as sung by any good choir, is a relationship of 3-to-2. That is, the "Fifth" is three halves of the Tonic. So if the Tonic is 200 Hz (cycles per second), the Fifth is 300 Hz. This is simple enough. In any case, every pure musical interval is a whole number ratio like those in the top line of the following table. Musicians have known this for thousands of years, and have used these ratios to define their tones, in ancient China, in Greece 2,000 years ago, in the Middle Ages, and even in the Renaissance. It is only in our modern era that most musicians have not been taught about these ratios, as we have adopted the letter notation of "A, Bb, B, C, C#," etc. Our modern notation assumes that all "A" notes are the same pitch, which in pure harmonic music is not the case.
