Justonic
Bill Gannon
(1947 - )
Realized that computers could retune electronic musical instruments while they were being played, maintaining pure harmony, and developed the system to do it.
Bill Gannon, an Irish-Canadian accountant, remembers the day in early 1983, after he unpacked and started his new IBM PC, a "READY>" prompt appeared because it booted-up in BASIC TM, the programming language written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. So he began reading the manual for BASIC and found that the "Play" command, used for playing musical notes, was hard coded to play only the frequencies of the equal tempered scale, and there was no way to adjust them.
Bill's dream of having a computer tune a musical instrument while it was being played had started in 1979 when he became aware of the tuning problem. The mathematics of music facinated him. In order to isolate the variables of the relationships between the 12 semitones, he drew the diagram below in 1989.
Imagine how he felt five years later when he discovered that Marin Mersenne had made the same drawing in the year 1648.
He began experimenting, using QBASIC TM and then Visual Basic TM . When he figured out how to program the early Soundblaster TM cards, he had the tools required for a simple prototype. Connecting the sine-wave output to an XY oscilloscope, he could see pure harmony by watching the geometric patterns that had been predicted by Jules Lissajous, a French mathematician, in 1867.
His friend Rex Weyler supported him, not only with enthusiasm, but also added his writing, research, musical and mathematical skills to the quest for a simple just intonation machine. In 1993, when they were working together on the problem, the idea of creating a Tuning Cube appeared as the solution. They were granted U.S. Patent. No. 5,501,130 and formed Justonic Tuning Inc.
From the Soundblaster experiments, they knew that the present tuning resolution of 100 cents per semitone was not accurate enough to create pure tones in every root of every key. They had an engineer build them a custom synthesizer with a tuning resolution of 1/100 Hertz for $2,000, connected it to the computer, a MIDI keyboard and an oscilloscope. You can see their results in the videos on our Demo page.
Rex Weyler
(1947 - )
Rex and Bill wrote The Story of Harmony , a history of human understanding and use of harmony from ancient China and Greece, through the classical period, and up to the present day.
Investors provided the capital necessary for them to upgrade the prototype and to take it, along with four professional musicians, to the 1997 NAMM Show in Los Angeles, California, the largest musical instrument showcase in the world.
U.S. Patent Number: 5,501,130
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is an electronic just intonation tuning apparatus and method that can be applied to musical instruments to create just intonation so that the instruments can be played in real time, based on any pitch, in all musical scales, using all musical scale intervals, in all chordal roots, in all musical keys.
The invention is based in part on the discovery that within the same key, when a chord changes, a new tuning of the musical scale is defined, based on the frequency of the new chordal root, and the new tuning variables are finite and can be identified by the selection of a key tonic and a chordal root. A key is defined by a tonic, or keynote, which is the fundamental note of a scale. The remaining notes of that scale are derived by the application of appropriate ratios to the tonic. The chordal root is the fundamental note of a chord within a given key. The present invention uses 3-dimensional (key, chordal root, and note) just intonation arrays based on accurate just intonation intervals for all chordal roots in all keys. The arrays may be implemented with an electronic logic circuit or by other logic means, including a programmed computer, mechanical linkage, hydraulics, pneumatics, or optics.
