Every musical instrument has both strengths and limitations. It’s not always easy to find one whose capabilities are a good match for your desires.
Yesterday I happened to stumble onto a video of someone playing the qanun. This instrument is shaped a bit like a zither, and lies flat on the player’s lap (or on a table) while being played. Typically there are 24 or 26 pitches in a sort of diatonic scale, each pitch being sounded by a course of three strings tuned in unison.
What immediately interested me about the qanun is the set of mandals at the end of each string. These little levers can adjust the pitch of a given note up or down by a fraction of a half-step. Wiggle a mandal rapidly and you have a trill. Leave it flipped and you’ve changed the tuning so that your instrument plays a different microtonal scale.
I’m not sure I want to start learning a new instrument from scratch, but I quite like this system. It strikes me as more straightforward and easier to use than computer-based alternative tuning setups, for several reasons.
One way to have access to a variety of tuning modes in a computer is to load a Scala file (a .tun or .scl file) into a compatible software synthesizer. This is eminently practical; the downside is that you’ll quite likely end up with 17 or 21 notes per octave in your scale, which means your MIDI keyboard layout will no longer bear the faintest resemblance to what you’re hearing. This imposes a drastic burden on performance technique.
If you want to stick with a conventional 12-note keyboard layout, again you can load a Scala file containing whatever tuning you’d like. But now you’re stuck with just one 12-note scale. It’s not possible to switch from one tuning mode to another while playing, as you could do on the qanun.
Is there a way to set up a computer-based synth to alter the pitch of one of the scale notes in response to a controller message? As far as I can see, this is all but impossible if you want to be able to play two or three notes at a time. In a polyphonic synth, the voices are assigned arbitrarily when a new note-on message arrives. Even in a polyphonic modular such as VCV Rack, it’s not possible to modulate, let’s say, the G-sharp, because you don’t know which voice channel will be playing it.
I did once program Native Instruments Reaktor to respond differently to pitch-bend messages depending on what note was sounding. Maybe I should dust off that patch. As far as I’m aware, no one else has ever done anything like it.
If you’re content to play monophonically, you can use pitch-bend messages with any software instrument. This will work, but now you can’t play chords. Any harmonizing that you want in the music will have to be pre-recorded rather than played spontaneously. It’s possible to fudge this limitation using a split keyboard, some notes on the left (not subject to pitch-bends) and some on the right. But pitch-bend wheels are usually spring-loaded. You can’t bend a note up or down and then leave it bent while your left hand goes on to do something else.
All of these factors make the qanun look like a much nicer choice than a computer for playing microtonal music. You can play polyphonically and adjust the pitch of specific notes in real time. But there are other factors to consider. First, there’s no way (short of building your own instrument) to control what the mandals will do to the pitch. They’re installed by the builder and provide access to whatever pitches the builder feels will be most useful. The Turkish qanun is apparently set up with something like 72-note equal temperament. I’m sure it’s a nice tuning system, but it may or may not end up being what I want.
Second, and this is a more controversial topic, the qanun is heavily associated with Middle Eastern culture. I try to be an equal opportunity atheist: I have no use for Christianity, nor for Judaism, nor for Islam. They’re all just a bunch of stupid shit. Nonetheless, it’s apparent that the Middle East is two or three hundred years behind the West in developing a secular culture. They’re still beheading people like me in Saudi Arabia, and atheists haven’t been burnt at the stake in Europe since the 17th century. If I start studying the qanun, I’ll certainly find myself interacting with people whose religious ideas I find abhorrent, and that’s not a pleasant prospect to contemplate.
A few years ago I bought an alternate MIDI keyboard from Starr Labs. I still have it. There were some intermittent technical problems, but the real reason I stopped using it was that the little keys are not responsive enough. They do sense finger velocity, but they don’t sense it well. Playing this keyboard, after setting up something like a 19-note-per-octave tuning, is an interesting intellectual exercise in that you can find cool chord voicings and then move them around quite freely, but it’s not a real musical experience.
There’s a fellow in Turkey named Tolgahan Çoğulu who builds and plays classical guitars with microtonal frets — with movable frets, even, that can be in a different place on each string. But you can’t move the frets while playing. Also, I’m pretty sure it would be easier to learn to play the qanun than to learn classical guitar. On the qanun the strings are just lying there — you don’t have to move your fingers around in an agile way to access the various chord shapes.
I play the cello. It might be practical to learn different hand shapes on the cello so as to produce microtonal scales. Any fretless instrument can play microtones — and often will, whether you want it to or not. But there’s no way to set a fixed tuning scale, and you’re pretty much limited to playing one note at a time. Multi-note playing is possible, but very limited.
A man named Geoff Smith has built what he calls a fluid piano — a piano whose individual pitches can be retuned during performance using sliders. This is a lovely idea, but it’s a custom-made hand-built piano, and would surely cost $75,000 or more, so that’s not one of my options.
Choices, choices.
oscillations & tunemania 