It's been waaay too long since I posted something on this blog that wasn't undub related, but over the past couple of days, I've actually been working on something pretty cool that I wanted to share here. It's a little app called Microtone. For anyone not familiar with microtonal music, basically the idea is to compose music using a scale other than the traditional 12-step scale used by almost all modern music. For some examples of microtonal music, check here, here, and here.
While microtonal music is certainly nothing new, very few instruments and tools exist for making it. Consequently, not that many people attempt to create music using non-traditional scales, and very little good music exists outside the boundaries of the standard 12 tones. I created Microtone as a quick app that people could use to experiment with different scales lengths, so that they might get ideas they wanted to use in serious compositions. Microtone itself is not really suitable for anything beyond experimentation, but I still think that it may serve the purpose of getting people interested in microtonal music. Or you can just mash your hands into the keyboard to make funny noises... Either way. ;)
Microtone works best with either Firefox, or a Chromium based browser (Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.). Internet Explorer doesn't work at all (not even the newer versions), which is probably a surprise to no one. Using Firefox is preferable, because it appears to have a better audio mixer. Chromium based browsers may have weird sound distortion issues when playing more than two notes at a time. Also, if you have issues hitting multiple notes at the same time on your keyboard, you may want to look into a keyboard with n-key rollover. Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments. ;)
