History of the tuning problem
Did you know that neither Bach, Beethoven nor the Beatles actually played in tune? Although Pythagoras discovered the pure harmonic ratios of the natural musical scale more than 2,500 years ago, there has remained the "insurmountable problem" of the Pythagorean comma, an extra quarter of a semitone per octave.
In order to maintain perfect harmony, a fixed-tone musical instrument must be retuned whenever there is a change in key or root.
Musicians have spread the comma among the 12 semitones of a scale in various ways:
- Meantone temperament, in which the thirds are perfect but the fifths are flat. This was common around the year 1600 when French theorist Marin Mersenne examined the physics of musical sound.
- Well tempered tuning, in which some notes are tuned to pure harmony with others, while others are not. J. S. Bach showed off the versatility of his well tempered tuning by publishing The Well Tempered Clavier , made up of 48 compositions of fugues and preludes in each of the 12 major and minor keys. In 1744, he published another 48 pieces in Volume II .
- Equal temperament (ET) was introduced to Nicholas Bach, elder cousin of J.S. Bach, in 1705. In this system, the octave is divided into 12 precisely equal degrees of tone. Although they are all slightly out of tune, it is more convenient than retuning the instrument when there is a change in the key or root of the composition. Singers and players of non-fretted instruments went along with ET in order to stay in tune with the fixed-tone instruments. The ability to sing out-of-tune in ET became a skill reserved by professional singers.
In 1854, German scientist Herman Helmholtz discovered combinational tones, a third tone heard whenever two musical tones of different harmonic pitches are sounded together. He pointed out that these are lost with ET due to the lack of intonation.
Music developed for a few hundred years using the advantages of ET.
Towards the end of the 20th century, electronic musical instruments were introduced, and their connection to personal computers was made with a protocol called MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface).
Surprised that flexible tuning had not been incorporated into his first IBM PC in 1982, Bill Gannon began working on what is now known as the Justonic Tuning Cube. It is the core of the Justonic Pitch Palette for Windows XP and MacOS9 .
All MIDI synthesizers can be retuned with the click of a single MIDI note during performance.
Problem solved.
Justonic Pitch Palette software, for Windows and Mac, calculates and sends the MIDI data necessary to keep your synthesizer tuned to pure harmony in every Root of every Key in any Scale. It also includes a collection of tools for any musician interested in experimenting with adding new tuning to their performance.
