Microtonal music is music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 using microtones—intervals of less than an equally spaced

Equal temperament

An equal temperament is a musical temperament, or a system of tuning, in which every pair of adjacent notes has an identical frequency ratio. As pitch is perceived roughly as the logarithm of frequency, this means that the perceived "distance" from every note to its nearest neighbor is the same for...

 semitone

Semitone

A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically....

. Microtonal music can also refer to music which uses intervals not found in the Western system of 12 equal intervals to the octave.

Terminology

Microtonal music can refer to all music which contains intervals smaller than the conventional contemporary Western semitone

Semitone

A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically....

. The term implies music containing very small intervals but can include any tuning that differs from the western 12-tone equal temperament

Equal temperament

An equal temperament is a musical temperament, or a system of tuning, in which every pair of adjacent notes has an identical frequency ratio. As pitch is perceived roughly as the logarithm of frequency, this means that the perceived "distance" from every note to its nearest neighbor is the same for...

. Traditional Indian systems of 22 śruti

Sruti (music)

The shruti is a Sanskrit term used in several contexts throughout the history of the Indian music. A shruti is the smallest interval of pitch the ear can detect.-Contexts:...

; Indonesian gamelan music

Gamelan

A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....

; Thai, Burmese, and African musics, and music using just intonation

Just intonation

In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

, meantone temperament

Meantone temperament

Meantone temperament is a musical temperament, which is a system of musical tuning. In general, a meantone is constructed the same way as Pythagorean tuning, as a stack of perfect fifths, but in meantone, each fifth is narrow compared to the ratio 27/12:1 in 12 equal temperament, the opposite of...

, or other alternative tunings may be considered microtonal.
(Griffiths and Lindley 1980; Griffiths, Lindley, and Zannos 2001). Microtonal variation of intervals is standard practice in the African-American musical forms of spirituals, blues and jazz (Cook and Pople 2004, 124–26).

Many microtonal equal divisions of the octave have been proposed, usually (but not always) in order to achieve approximation to the intervals of just intonation. (Griffiths and Lindley 1980; Griffiths, Lindley, and Zannos 2001)

Terminology other than "microtonal" is used by theorists and composers. Ivan Wyschnegradsky used the term ultra-chromatic for intervals smaller than the semitone and infra-chromatic for intervals larger than the semitone (Wyschnegradsky 1972, 84–87). Ivor Darreg

Ivor Darreg

Ivor Darreg was a leading proponent of and composer of microtonal or "xenharmonic" music. He also created a series of experimental musical instruments.Darreg, a contemporary of Harry Partch and a close colleague of John H...

 proposed the term xenharmonic. (See xenharmonic

Xenharmony

Xenharmonic is a term used to describe tuning systems, or music using those systems, which does not conform to or closely approximate the common 12-tone equal temperament. The term was coined by Ivor Darreg, from xenia , hospitable, and xenos foreign...

 music).

History

The Hellenic civilizations of ancient Greece left fragmentary records of their music—c.f., the Delphic Hymns. The ancient Greeks approached the creation of different musical intervals and modes by dividing and combining tetrachord

Tetrachord

Traditionally, a tetrachord is a series of three intervals filling in the interval of a perfect fourth, a 4:3 frequency proportion. In modern usage a tetrachord is any four-note segment of a scale or tone row. The term tetrachord derives from ancient Greek music theory...

s, recognizing three genera of tetrachords: the enharmonic, the chromatic, and the diatonic. Ancient Greek intervals were of many different sizes, including microtones. The enharmonic genus in particular featured intervals of a distinctly "microtonal" nature, which were sometimes smaller than 50 cents

Cent (music)

The cent is a logarithmic unit of measure used for musical intervals. Twelve-tone equal temperament divides the octave into 12 semitones of 100 cents each...

, less than half of the contemporary Western semitone

Semitone

A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically....

 of 100 cents. In the ancient Greek enharmonic genus, the tetrachord contained a semitone of varying sizes (approximately 100 cents) divided into two such smaller, microtonal, intervals; in conjunction with a larger interval of roughly 400 cents, these intervals comprised the perfect fourth (approximately 498 cents, or the ratio of 4/3 in just intonation

Just intonation

In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

) (West 1992, 160–72).

Guillaume Costeley

Guillaume Costeley

Guillaume Costeley was a French composer of the Renaissance. He was the court organist to Charles IX of France and famous for his numerous chansons, which were representative of the late development of the form; his work in this regard was part of the early development of the style known as...

's "Chromatic Chanson", "Seigneur Dieu ta pitié" of 1558 used 1/3 comma meantone and explored the full compass of 19 pitches in the octave. (Lindley 2001a).

The Italian Renaissance

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

 composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino

Nicola Vicentino

Nicola Vicentino was an Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most visionary musicians of the age, inventing, among other things, a microtonal keyboard, and devising a practical system of chromatic writing two hundred years before the rise of equal...

 (1511–1576) worked with microtonal intervals building a keyboard with 36 keys to the octave, known as the archicembalo

Archicembalo

The Archicembalo was a musical instrument constructed by Nicola Vicentino in 1555. This was a harpsichord built with many extra keys and strings, enabling experimentation in microtonality and just intonation.- Construction :...

. Theoretically an interpretation of ancient Greek tetrachordal theory, in effect Vincento presented a circulating system of quarter-comma meantone, maintaing major thirds tuned in Just intonation

Just intonation

In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

 in all keys (Barbour 1951, 117–18).

Jacques Fromental Halévy composed a quarter-tone work for soli, choir and orchestra "Prométhée enchaîné" in 1849.

In the 1910s and 1920s, quarter tone

Quarter tone

A quarter tone , is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale, an interval about half as wide as a semitone, which is half a whole tone....

s (24 equal pitches per octave) received attention from composers as Charles Ives

Charles Ives

Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...

, Julián Carrillo

Julián Carrillo

Julián Carrillo Trujillo was a Mexican composer, conductor, violinist and music theorist, famous for developing a theory of microtonal music which he dubbed "The Thirteenth Sound" .-Biography:...

, Alois Hába

Alois Hába

Alois Hába was a Czech composer, musical theorist and teacher. He is primarily known for his microtonal compositions, especially using the quarter tone scale, though he used others such as sixth-tones and twelfth-tones....

, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Mildred Couper

Mildred Couper

Mildred Couper , prominent American composer and pianist, was one of the first musicians to experiment with quarter-tone music. She was based in Santa Barbara, California, but her music and influence were felt around the world...

. Erwin Schulhoff

Erwin Schulhoff

Erwin Schulhoff was a Czech composer and pianist.-Life:Born in Prague of Jewish-German origin, Schulhoff was one of the brightest figures in a generation of European musicians whose successful careers were prematurely terminated by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany...

 gave classes in quarter-tone composition at the Prague Conservatory

Prague Conservatory

Prague Conservatory, sometimes also Prague Conservatoire, in Czech Pražská konzervatoř, is a Czech secondary school in Prague dedicated to teaching the arts of music and theater acting.- Instruction :...

.

Alexander John Ellis

Alexander John Ellis

Alexander John Ellis FRS was an English mathematician and philologist. He changed his name from his father's name Sharpe to his mother's maiden name Ellis in 1825, based on a condition for receiving significant financial support from a relative on his mother's side.- Biography :He was born...

, who in the 1880s produced a translation with extensive footnotes and appendices to Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone, proposed an elaborate set of exotic just intonation tunings and non-harmonic tunings (Helmholtz 1885, 514–27). Ellis also studied the tunings of non-Western cultures and, in a report to the Royal Society, stated that they did not use either equal divisions of the octave or just intonation intervals (Ellis 1884). Ellis inspired Harry Partch

Harry Partch

Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...

 immensely (Partch 1979, vii).

During the Exposition Universelle of 1889, Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

 heard a Balinese gamelan performance and was exposed to non-Western tunings and rhythms. Some scholars have ascribed Debussy's subsequent innovative use of the whole-tone (6 equal pitches per octave) tuning in such compositions as the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra and the Toccata from the suite Pour le piano to his exposure to the Balinese gamelan at the Paris exposition (Lesure 2001), and have asserted his rebellion at this time "against the rule of equal temperament" and that the gamelan gave him "the confidence to embark (after the 1900 world exhibition) on his fully characteristic mature piano works, with their many bell- and gong-like sonorities and brilliant exploitation of the piano’s natural resonance" (Howat 2001). Still others have argued that Debussy's works like L'Isle joyeuse, La Cathédrale engloutie, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, La Mer, Pagodes, Danseuses de Delphes, and Cloches à travers les feuilles are marked by a more basic interest in the microtonal intervals found between the higher members of the overtone series, under the influence of Hermann Helmholtz's writings (Don 1991, 69 et passim). Berliner's introduction of the phonograph in the 1890s allowed much non-Western music to be recorded and heard by Western composers, further spurring the use of non-12-equal tunings.

Experimenting with the violin in 1895, Julian Carrillo

Julián Carrillo

Julián Carrillo Trujillo was a Mexican composer, conductor, violinist and music theorist, famous for developing a theory of microtonal music which he dubbed "The Thirteenth Sound" .-Biography:...

 (1875–1965) distinguished sixteenth tones, i.e., sixteen clearly different sounds between the pitches of G and A emitted by the fourth violin string. He named these microtonal distinctions Sonido 13

Sonido 13

Sonido 13 is a theory of microtonal music created by the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo around 1900 and described by Nicolas Slonimsky as, "the field of sounds smaller than the twelve semitones of the tempered scale". Developed in 1895 while he was experimenting with his violin...

(the thirteenth sound) and wrote on music theory and the physics of music. He invented a simple numerical musical notation to represent scales based on any division of the octave, such as thirds, fourths, quarters, fifths, sixths, sevenths, and so on (even if Carrillo wrote, most of the time, for quarters, eights, and sixteenths combined, the notation is intended to represent any imaginable subdivision). He invented new musical instruments, and adapted other instruments to produce microintervals. He composed a large amount of microtonal music and recorded about 30 of his compositions.

Major microtonal composers of the 1920s and 1930s include Alois Hába

Alois Hába

Alois Hába was a Czech composer, musical theorist and teacher. He is primarily known for his microtonal compositions, especially using the quarter tone scale, though he used others such as sixth-tones and twelfth-tones....

 (quarter tones, or 24 equal pitches per octave, and sixth tones), Julian Carillo (24 equal, 36, 48, 60, 72, and 96 equal pitches to the octave embodied in a series of specially custom-built pianos), Ivan Wyschnegradsky (third tones, quarter tones, sixth tones and twelfth tones, non octaving scales) and the early works of Harry Partch

Harry Partch

Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...

 (just intonation using frequencies at ratios of prime integers 3, 5, 7, and 11, their powers, and products of those numbers, from a central frequency of G-196) (Partch 1979, chapt. 8, "Application of the 11 Limit", 119–37).

Prominent microtonal composers or researchers of the 1940s and 1950s include Adriaan Daniel Fokker (31 equal tones per octave), Partch (continuing to build his handcrafted orchestra of microtonal just intonation instruments), and Eivind Groven

Eivind Groven

Eivind Groven was a Norwegian microtonal composer and music-theorist. He was from Telemark and had his background in the folk music of the area.- Biography :...

.

Barbara Benary also formed Gamelan Son of Lion around this period, and Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison

Lou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison...

 was instrumental in creating American gamelan orchestras at Mills College

Mills College

Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded...

. In Europe, the "Spectralists" in Paris created their first works from 1973 on with an extensive use of microtonal harmony. The main composers were Hugues Dufourt

Hugues Dufourt

Hugues Dufourt is a French composer and philosopher associated with the Spectral school of composition. Born in Lyon on September 28 1943, Dufourt studied piano and composition at the Geneva Conservatory....

, Gérard Grisey

Gérard Grisey

Gérard Grisey was a French composer of contemporary music.-Biography:Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort, France on 17 June 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire de Paris...

, Tristan Murail

Tristan Murail

Tristan Murail is a French composer. His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist. One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, aka Moka, also write, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer...

 and Michael Levinas; see also the Parisian ensemble "L'itinéraire".

Digital synthesizers from the Yamaha TX81Z (1987) on and inexpensive software synthesizers have contributed to the ease and popularity of exploring microtonal music.

Microtonalism in electronic music

Electronic music facilitates the use of any kind of microtonal tuning, and sidesteps the need to develop new notational systems (Griffiths, Lindley, and Zannos 2001). In 1954, Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

 built his electronic Studie II

Studie II

Studie II is an electronic music composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen from the year 1954 and, together with his Studie I, comprises his work number 3...

on an 81-step scale starting from 100 Hz with the interval of 5^1/25 between steps (Stockhausen 1964, 37), and in Gesang der Jünglinge

Gesang der Jünglinge

Gesang der Jünglinge is a noted electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was realized in 1955–56 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne and is Work Number 8 in the composer's catalog of works...

(1955–56) he used various scales, ranging from seven up to sixty equal divisions of the octave (Decroupet and Ungeheuer 1998, 105, 116, 119–21). In 1955, Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek was an Austrian of Czech origin and, from 1945, American composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music...

 used 13 equal-tempered intervals per octave in his Whitsun oratorio, Spiritus intelligentiae, sanctus (Griffiths, Lindley, and Zannos 2001).

In 1986, Wendy Carlos

Wendy Carlos

Wendy Carlos is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A...

 experimented with many microtonal systems including just intonation

Just intonation

In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

, using alternate tuning scales she invented for the album Beauty In the Beast. "This whole formal discovery came a few weeks after I had completed the album, Beauty in the Beast, which is wholly in new tunings and timbres" (Carlos 1989–96).

Microtonalism in rock music

A form of microtone known as the blue note

Blue note

In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres. Country blues, in particular, features wide variations from the...

 is an integral part of rock music

Rock music

Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...

 and one of its predecessors, the blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

. The blue notes, located on the third, fifth, and seventh notes of a diatonic major scale, are flattened by a variable microtone. (Ferguson 1999, 20).

See also

• Sonido 13
  Sonido 13
  Sonido 13 is a theory of microtonal music created by the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo around 1900 and described by Nicolas Slonimsky as, "the field of sounds smaller than the twelve semitones of the tempered scale". Developed in 1895 while he was experimenting with his violin...
  
  
• 3rd Bridge
  3rd Bridge
  The 3rd bridge is an extended playing technique used on some string instruments , that allows a musician to produce distinctive timbres and overtones that are unavailable on a conventional string instrument with two bridges...
  
  
• Arab tone system
  Arab tone system
  The modern Arab tone system, or system of musical tuning, is based upon the theoretical division of the octave into twenty-four equal divisions or 24-tone equal temperament , the distance between each successive note being a quarter tone . Each tone has its own name not repeated in different...
  
   and maqam
  Arabic maqam
  Arabic maqām is the system of melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music, which is mainly melodic. The word maqam in Arabic means place, location or rank. The Arabic maqam is a melody type...
  
  
• Bohlen Pierce
• Fokker periodicity blocks
  Fokker periodicity blocks
  Fokker periodicity blocks are a concept in tuning theory used to mathematically relate musical intervals in just intonation to those in equal tuning. They are named after Adriaan Daniël Fokker...
  
  
• Genus (music)
• Harmony
  Harmony
  In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
  
  
• Just intonation
  Just intonation
  In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...
  
  
• Limit (music)
  Limit (music)
  In music theory, limit or harmonic limit is a way of characterizing the harmony found in a piece or genre of music, or the harmonies that can be made using a particular scale. The term was introduced by Harry Partch, who used it to give an upper bound on the complexity of harmony; hence the name...
  
  
• Microtuner
  Microtuner
  A microtuner or microtonal tuner is an electronic device or software program designed to modify and test the tuning of musical instruments with microtonal precision, allowing for the design and construction of microtonal scales and just intonation scales, and for tuning intervals that differ from...
  
  
• MIDI tuning standard
  MIDI Tuning Standard
  MIDI Tuning Standard is a specification of precise musical pitch agreed to by the MIDI Manufacturers Association in the MIDI protocol. MTS allows for both a bulk tuning dump message, giving a tuning for each of 128 notes, and a tuning message for individual notes as they are played.-Frequency...
  
  
• Music of India
  Music of India
  The music of India includes multiple varieties of folk, popular, pop, classical music and R&B. India's classical music tradition, including Carnatic and Hindustani music, has a history spanning millennia and developed over several eras. It remains fundamental to the lives of Indians today as...
  
  
• Musical scale
  Musical scale
  In music, a scale is a sequence of musical notes in ascending and descending order. Most commonly, especially in the context of the common practice period, the notes of a scale will belong to a single key, thus providing material for or being used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical...
  
  
• Musical tuning
  Musical tuning
  In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:* Tuning practice, the act of tuning an instrument or voice.* Tuning systems, the various systems of pitches used to tune an instrument, and their theoretical bases.-Tuning practice:...
  
  
• Partch's 43-tone scale
  Harry Partch's 43-tone scale
  The 43-tone scale is a just intonation scale with 43 pitches in each octave, invented and used by Harry Partch.The first of Partch's "four concepts" is "The scale of musical intervals begins with absolute consonance and gradually progresses into an infinitude of dissonance, the consonance of the...
  
  
• Quarter tone
  Quarter tone
  A quarter tone , is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale, an interval about half as wide as a semitone, which is half a whole tone....
  
  
• Raga
  Raga
  A raga is one of the melodic modes used in Indian classical music.It is a series of five or more musical notes upon which a melody is made...
  
  
• Scala
  Scala (program)
  Scala is a freeware software application with versions supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It allows users to create and archive musical scales, analyze and transform them with built-in theoretical tools, play them with an on-screen keyboard or from an external MIDI keyboard, and export them...
  
  

Western microtonal pioneers

Pioneers of modern Western microtonal music include:

• Henry Ward Poole
  Henry Ward Poole
  Henry Ward Poole was an American surveyor, civil engineer, educator and writer on and inventor of systems of musical tuning. He was brother of the famous librarian William Frederick Poole, and cousin of the celebrated humorist, journalist and politician Fitch Poole.-Biography:Poole was born 13...
  
   (keyboard designs, 1825–1890)
• Eugène Ysaÿe
  Eugène Ysaÿe
  Eugène Ysaÿe was a Belgian violinist, composer and conductor born in Liège. He was regarded as "The King of the Violin", or, as Nathan Milstein put it, the "tzar"...
  
   (Belgium, U.S.A., 1858–1931, used quarter tones in several of the Sonatas for Solo Violin, Op. 27)
• Charles Ives
  Charles Ives
  Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
  
   (U.S.A., 1874–1954, quartertones)
• Julián Carrillo
  Julián Carrillo
  Julián Carrillo Trujillo was a Mexican composer, conductor, violinist and music theorist, famous for developing a theory of microtonal music which he dubbed "The Thirteenth Sound" .-Biography:...
  
   (Mexico, 1875–1965) many different equal temperaments, look here or here (mostly Spanish but some English too)
• Béla Bartók
  Béla Bartók
  Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
  
   (Hungary, 1881–1945, rare uses of quartertones)
• George Enescu
  George Enescu
  George Enescu was a Romanian composer, violinist, pianist, conductor and teacher.-Biography:Enescu was born in the village of Liveni , Dorohoi County at the time, today Botoşani County. He showed musical talent from early in his childhood. A child prodigy, Enescu created his first musical...
  
   (Romania, France, 1881–1955) (in Œdipe to suggest the enharmonic genus
  Enharmonic genus
  The enharmonic genus has historically been the most mysterious and controversial of the three Greek genera of tetrachords. Its characteristic interval is a major third, leaving the remainder of the tetrachord to be divided by two intervals smaller than a semitone...
  
   of ancient Greek music, and in the Third Violin Sonata, as inflections characteristic of Romanian folk music)
• Karol Szymanowski
  Karol Szymanowski
  Karol Maciej Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist.-Life:Szymanowski was born into a wealthy land-owning Polish gentry family in Tymoszówka, then in the Russian Empire, now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus'...
  
   (Poland, 1882–1937, used quartertones on the violin in Myths Op. 30, 1915)
• Percy Grainger
  Percy Grainger
  George Percy Aldridge Grainger , known as Percy Grainger, was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. He also made many...
  
   (Australia, 1882–1961, particularly works for his "free music machine")
• Edgard Varèse
  Edgard Varèse
  Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
  
   (France, U.S.A., 1883–1965, quartertones)
• Luigi Russolo
  Luigi Russolo
  Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
  
   (Italy, 1885–1947, used quartertones and eighth tones on the Intonarumori, noise instruments)
• Mildred Couper
  Mildred Couper
  Mildred Couper , prominent American composer and pianist, was one of the first musicians to experiment with quarter-tone music. She was based in Santa Barbara, California, but her music and influence were felt around the world...
  
   (U.S.A., 1887–1974, quartertones)
• Alois Hába
  Alois Hába
  Alois Hába was a Czech composer, musical theorist and teacher. He is primarily known for his microtonal compositions, especially using the quarter tone scale, though he used others such as sixth-tones and twelfth-tones....
  
   (Czechoslovakia, 1893–1973, quartertones and other equal temperaments)
• Ivan Wyschnegradsky (U.S.S.R. (Russia), France, 1893–1979, quartertones, twelfth tones and other equal temperaments)
• Harry Partch
  Harry Partch
  Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...
  
   (U.S.A., 1901–1974, just intonation)
• Eivind Groven
  Eivind Groven
  Eivind Groven was a Norwegian microtonal composer and music-theorist. He was from Telemark and had his background in the folk music of the area.- Biography :...
  
   (Norway, 1901–1977, 53ET)
• Henk Badings
  Henk Badings
  Henk Badings was a Dutch composer.Born in Bandung, Java, Dutch East Indies, as the son of Herman Louis Johan Badings, an officer in the Dutch East Indies army, Badings became an orphan at an early age...
  
   (The Netherlands, 1907–1987, 31ET)
• Maurice Ohana
  Maurice Ohana
  Maurice Ohana was an Anglo-French composer of Sephardic Jewish origin.Ohana was born in Casablanca, Morocco. He was a British citizen until 1976, as his father had been born in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. He originally studied architecture, but abandoned this in favour of a...
  
   (France, 1913–1992, third tones (18-equal) temperament and quarter tones (24ET) most particularly)
• Giacinto Scelsi
  Giacinto Scelsi
  Giacinto Scelsi , Count of Ayala Valva was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French....
  
   (Italy, 1905–1988, intuitive linear tone deviations, quartertones, eighth tones)
• Lou Harrison
  Lou Harrison
  Lou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison...
  
   (U.S.A., 1917–2003, just intonation)
• Ivor Darreg
  Ivor Darreg
  Ivor Darreg was a leading proponent of and composer of microtonal or "xenharmonic" music. He also created a series of experimental musical instruments.Darreg, a contemporary of Harry Partch and a close colleague of John H...
  
   (U.S.A., 1917–1994)
• Jean-Etienne Marie
  Jean-Etienne Marie
  Jean-Etienne Marie was a French composer of contemporary music. He is an important figure in the history and exploration of Microtonal music and electroacoustic.-Biography:...
  
   (France, 1919–1989, many different equal temperaments: 18ET, 24ET, 30ET, 36ET, 48ET, 96ET most particularly and polymicrotonality)
• Franz Richter Herf (Austria, 1920–1989, 72-equal temperament, "ekmelic" music)
• Iannis Xenakis
  Iannis Xenakis
  Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
  
   (Greece, France, 1922–2001, quarter and third tones most particularly, occasionally eighth tones)
• György Ligeti
  György Ligeti
  György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...
  
   (Hungary, 1923–2006, Ramifications in quartertone tuning, natural harmonics in his Horn Trio, later just intonation in his solo concertos)
• Luigi Nono
  Luigi Nono
  Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music and remains one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century.- Early years :Born in Venice, he was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter...
  
   (Italy, 1924–1990, quartetones, eighth tones and 16th tones)
• Claude Ballif
  Claude Ballif
  Claude Ballif was a French composer.His music is known as a combination of tonality and serialism - a system that he named metatonality....
  
   (France, 1924–2004, quartertones)
• Tui St. George Tucker
  Tui St. George Tucker
  Tui St. George Tucker was an American composer and recorder player....
  
   (1924–2004)
• Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
  
   (France, b. 1925) (first attempt of serial music with quartertones in his pieces Visage Nuptial and "Polyphonie X", but soon after abandoning microtonal elements)
• Karlheinz Stockhausen
  Karlheinz Stockhausen
  Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
  
   (Germany, 1928–2007, in his electronic works many microtonal concepts, non-octaving scales in Studie II, just intonation in Gruppen
  Gruppen (Stockhausen)
  Gruppen for three orchestras is amongst the best-known compositions of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and is Work Number 6 in the composer's catalog of works. Gruppen is "a landmark in 20th-century music . ....
  
  and Stimmung
  Stimmung
  Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, is a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in 1968 and commissioned by the City of Cologne for the Collegium Vocale Köln. Its average length is seventy-four minutes, and it bears the work number 24 in the composer's catalog...
  
  , microtonal instrumental and vocal writing throughout Licht
  Licht
  Licht , subtitled "The Seven Days of the Week," is a cycle of seven operas composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2003. In total, the cycle contains over 29 hours of music.-Origin:...
  
  )
• Ben Johnston (U.S.A., b. 1926, extended just intonation)
• Ezra Sims
  Ezra Sims
  Ezra Sims is one of the pioneers in the field of microtonal composition. He invented a system of notation which was adopted by many microtonal composers after him, including Joseph Maneri....
  
   (U.S.A., b. 1928, 72-tone equal temperament)
• Erv Wilson
  Erv Wilson
  Ervin Wilson is a Mexican/American music theorist. Despite his avoidance of academia, Wilson has been influential on those interested in microtonal music and just intonation, especially in the areas of scale, keyboard, and notation design...
  
   (b. 1928)
• Alvin Lucier
  Alvin Lucier
  Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and...
  
   (U.S.A., b. 1931)
• Joel Mandelbaum
  Joel Mandelbaum
  Joel Mandelbaum is an American music composer and teacher, best known for his use of microtonal tuning . He also has written the first Ph.D. dissertation on microtonality, in 1961. He is married to stained glass artist , and is the nephew of Abraham Edel.-Life & Music:Mandelbaum received his Ph.D...
  
   (U.S.A., b. 1932)
• Krzysztof Penderecki
  Krzysztof Penderecki
  Krzysztof Penderecki , born November 23, 1933 in Dębica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these...
  
   (Poland, b. 1933, quartertones)
• Easley Blackwood (b. 1933)
• Alain Bancquart
  Alain Bancquart
  Alain Bancquart is a French composer. He had his musical formation at the "Conservatoire national supérieur de musique de Paris" with Darius Milhaud. He was a violist with the Orchestre National de France until 1973...
  
  (France, b.1934) (quarter tones and 16th tones)
• James Tenney
  James Tenney
  James Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...
  
   (U.S.A., 1934–2006, just intonation, 72-tone equal temperament)
• Terry Riley
  Terry Riley
  Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
  
   (U.S.A., b. 1935, just intonation)
• La Monte Young
  La Monte Young
  La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
  
   (U.S.A., b. 1935, just intonation)
• Douglas Leedy
  Douglas Leedy
  Douglas Leedy is an American composer, performer and music scholar.-Biography:Born in Portland, Oregon, Leedy studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was in a composition seminar with membership including La Monte Young and Terry Riley...
  
   (b. 1938, just intonation, meantone)
• Wendy Carlos
  Wendy Carlos
  Wendy Carlos is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A...
  
   (U.S.A., b. 1939, non-octaving scales)
• Bruce Mather
  Bruce Mather
  Bruce Mather is a Canadian composer, pianist, and writer who is particularly known for his contributions to contemporary classical music. One of the most notable composers of microtonal music, he was awarded the Jules Léger Prize twice, first in 1979 for his Musique pour Champigny and again in...
  
   (Canada, b.1939, different equal temperaments, following Wyschnegradsky)
• Brian Ferneyhough
  Brian Ferneyhough
  Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an English composer. His music is characterized by the extensive use of complex rhythmic tuplet notation which features in all his works...
  
   (Great Britain, b. 1943, quartertones, 31ET in Unity Capsule for solo flute,1976)

Recent microtonal composers

• Clarence Barlow
  Clarence Barlow
  Clarence Barlow is a composer of classical and electroacoustic works.-Biography:Barlow was born in Calcutta, a member of the anglophone minority, of British and Portuguese descent...
  
   (b. 1945)
• Gérard Grisey
  Gérard Grisey
  Gérard Grisey was a French composer of contemporary music.-Biography:Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort, France on 17 June 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire de Paris...
  
    (1946–1998) (spectral approach to microintervals, quartertones, eighth tones)
• Max Méreaux
  Max Méreaux
  Max Méreaux is a French composer. He was born in October 1946 at Saint-Omer, near Calais, where he took music lessons. After gaining his baccalaureate in philosophy he studied musical analysis at the Paris Conservatoire under Jacques Castérède....
  
    (b. 1946)
• Tristan Murail
  Tristan Murail
  Tristan Murail is a French composer. His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist. One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, aka Moka, also write, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer...
  
    (b. 1947) (spectral approach to microintervals, quartertones, eighth tones)
• Claude Vivier
  Claude Vivier
  -Biography:Born to unknown parents in Montreal, Vivier was adopted at the age of three by a poor French-Canadian family. From the age of thirteen, he attended boarding schools run by the Marist Brothers, a religious order that prepared young boys for a vocation in the priesthood. At the age of...
  
   (1948–1983)
• Glenn Branca
  Glenn Branca
  Glenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca...
  
   (b. 1948)
• Dean Drummond
  Dean Drummond
  Dean Drummond is an American composer, conductor and musician. His music utilises microtonality, electronics, and a huge variety of percussion...
  
   (b. 1949) (Harry Partch's instruments currently in his possession)
• Lasse Thoresen
  Lasse Thoresen
  Lasse Thoresen is a Norwegian composer whose works concentrate on a contemporary transformation of the folk-music traditions of many peoples, especially those of Scandinavia.-Biography:...
  
   (b. 1949)
• Warren Burt
  Warren Burt
  Warren Burt is an Australia-based composer of American birth. He is known for composing in a wide variety of new music styles, ranging from acoustic music, electroacoustic music, sound art installations, and text-based music...
  
   (b. 1949)
• Manfred Stahnke
  Manfred Stahnke
  Manfred Stahnke is a German composer and musicologist from Kiel. He writes chamber music, orchestral music and stage music. His music is notably known for his use of microtonality.- Life:...
  
   (b. 1951)
• Kraig Grady
  Kraig Grady
  Kraig Grady is a US-Australian composer/sound artist. He has composed and performed with an ensemble of microtonal instruments of his own design and also worked as a shadow puppeteer, tuning theorist, filmmaker, world music radio DJ and concert promoter...
  
   (b. 1952) (invented acoustic instruments in just intonation & recurrent sequences)
• David First
  David First
  David First is an American composer. His music most often deals with drones and interference beats, the latter aligning his music with that of Alvin Lucier...
  
   (b. 1953)
• Georg Friedrich Haas
  Georg Friedrich Haas
  Georg Friedrich Haas is an Austrian composer of spectral music.He grew up in Tschagguns and studied composition with Gösta Neuwirth, Iván Erőd, and piano with Doris Wolf at the Musikhochschule in Graz...
  
   (b. 1953)
• James Wood
  James Wood (composer)
  James Wood is a British composer, percussionist and conductor -Life:James Wood studied organ in Cambridge. He also studied at the Royal Academy of Music...
  
   (b. 1953)
• Paul Dirmeikis
  Paul Dirmeikis
  Paul Dirmeikis is a Francophone poet, composer, singer, and painter who lives in Brittany. He is of Lithuanian ancestry , and a member of the Lithuanian Composers Union....
  
   (b. 1954)
• Pascale Criton
  Pascale Criton
  Pascale Criton is a French musicologist and a composer of contemporary music, more specifically microtonal music. She is particularly known for exploiting very dense microtonal scales such as 1/12 tone or 1/16 and beyond for the particular perception properties they imply.-Life:Born in 1954 in...
  
   (b. 1954) (different equal temperaments, most particularly very dense ETs such as the 96ET)
• Stephen James Taylor
  Stephen James Taylor
  Stephen James Taylor is a Los Angeles based composer best known for his film and TV scores with 4 Emmy nominations , 2 Annie nominations and a DVD-X Award on "Best Original Score to date...
  
   (b. 1954)
• Kyle Gann
  Kyle Gann
  Kyle Eugene Gann is an American professor of music, critic and composer born in Dallas, Texas. As a critic for The Village Voice and other publications he has been a supporter of progressive music including such Downtown movements as postminimalism and totalism.- As composer :As a composer his...
  
   (b. 1955)
• Pascal Dusapin
  Pascal Dusapin
  Pascal Dusapin , is a French composer born in Nancy. He is one of France's best-known living composers; his works have been performed worldwide....
  
   (b. 1955) (different equal temperaments, notably the 48ET)
• Johnny Reinhard
  Johnny Reinhard
  Johnny Reinhard is a microtonal composer, bassoonist and conductor. He employs many avant-garde techniques in his bassoon performance such as glissando and multiphonics, as well as using just intonation and other microtonal tuning systems. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music and at...
  
   (b. 1956) (different equal temperaments, just intonation, polymicrotonally)
• Eric Mandat
  Eric Mandat
  Eric Paul Mandat is a composer and performer of contemporary clarinet music.Mandat began his clarinet studies under the tutelage of Richard Joiner of the Denver Symphony. He later studied with Lee Gibson, Keith Wilson, D. Stanley Hasty, and Charles Neidich...
  
   (b. 1957)
• Erling Wold
  Erling Wold
  Erling Wold is a San Francisco based composer of opera and contemporary classical music. He is best known for his later chamber operas, especially A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil and his early experiments as a microtonalist...
  
   (b. 1958)
• Michael Bach Bachtischa
  Michael Bach (cellist, composer, visual artist)
  Michael Bach is a German cellist, composer, and visual artist, also known as Michael Bach Bachtischa.-Biography:...
  
    (b. 1958)
• Martin Smolka
  Martin Smolka
  Martin Smolka is a contemporary Czech composer of classical music.- Works :1983* Slzy ;1985-19881988* Music for Retuned Instruments;1989* Zvonění for solo percussion;* Nocturne;...
  
   (b. 1959)
• Georg Hajdu
  Georg Hajdu
  Georg Hajdu is a German composer of Hungarian descent. His work is dedicated to the combination of music, science and computer technology. He is noted for his opera Der Sprung – Beschreibung einer Oper and the network music performance environment Quintet.net.-Biography:Hajdu was born to Hungarian...
  
   (b. 1960)
• William Susman
  William Susman
  William Joseph Susman, born August 29, 1960 in Chicago, is an American composer of concert and film music as well as an accomplished pianist. He belongs to the generation of American composers that came of age in the late twentieth century, received traditional academic training while remaining...
  
   (b. 1960)
• Daniel James Wolf
  Daniel James Wolf
  Daniel James Wolf is an American composer.- Studies :Wolf studied composition with Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, and La Monte Young, as well as musical tunings with Erv Wilson and Douglas Leedy and ethnomusicology . Important contacts with Lou Harrison, John Cage, Walter Zimmermann...
  
   (b. 1961)
• François Paris
  François Paris
  François Paris is a French composer and professor born in 1961 in Valenciennes.He is known for being part of the young generation of composers using microtonal music in the continuation of the spirit of the pioneers of this music.-Life:...
  
   (b. 1961)
• Harold Fortuin
  Harold Fortuin
  Harold Fortuin is an American composer, pianist, and designer of hardware and software for electronic music....
  
   (b. 1964)
• Marc Sabat
  Marc Sabat
  Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer based in Berlin since 1999.-Works:He has made installations, video works and concert music pieces using acoustic instruments and, in some recent pieces, computer-generated electronics, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of small...
  
   (b. 1965)
• Georges Lentz
  Georges Lentz
  Georges Lentz is a contemporary composer and sound artist, born in Luxembourg in 1965, and is that country's internationally best known composer. Since 1990, he has been living in Sydney, Australia...
  
   (b. 1965)
• Geoff Smith (b. 1966)
• Yitzhak Yedid
  Yitzhak Yedid
  Yitzhak Yedid is an Israeli Australian composer of classical music and jazz pianist.-Biography:Yitzhak Yedid was born on September 29, 1971 in Jerusalem, Israel. His family immigrated from Syria. He studied at the Rubin Academy of Music and the New England Conservatory in Boston with Ran Blake...
  
   (b. 1971)
• Adam Silverman
  Adam Silverman
  Adam Benjamin Silverman is a composer of contemporary classical music. His works include the opera Korczak's Orphans , chamber and orchestral music, and music for the theater...
  
   (b. 1973)
• Yuri Landman
  Yuri Landman
  Yuri Landman is a Dutch experimental luthier who has made several experimental electric string instruments for a list of artists including Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Liars, Jad Fair of Half Japanese and Liam Finn...
  
   (b. 1973)
• Kristoffer Zegers
  Kristoffer Zegers
  Kristoffer Zegers is a Dutch composer.Taught by Gilius van Bergeijk, Jan Boerman, Martijn Padding, Clarence Barlow, Diderik Wagenaar at the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag.In Zegers' music microtonal clusters are the main object...
  
   (b. 1973)

Microtonal researchers

• Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695)
• Julián Carrillo
  Julián Carrillo
  Julián Carrillo Trujillo was a Mexican composer, conductor, violinist and music theorist, famous for developing a theory of microtonal music which he dubbed "The Thirteenth Sound" .-Biography:...
  
   (1875–1965)
• Adriaan Daniël Fokker (1887–1972)
• Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979)
• Alois Hába
  Alois Hába
  Alois Hába was a Czech composer, musical theorist and teacher. He is primarily known for his microtonal compositions, especially using the quarter tone scale, though he used others such as sixth-tones and twelfth-tones....
  
   (1893–1973)
• Harry Partch
  Harry Partch
  Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...
  
   (1901–1974)
• Alain Daniélou
  Alain Daniélou
  Alain Daniélou was a French historian, intellectual, musicologist, Indologist, and a noted Western convert to and expert on Shaivite Hinduism.-Life:...
  
   (1907–1994)
• Jean-Etienne Marie
  Jean-Etienne Marie
  Jean-Etienne Marie was a French composer of contemporary music. He is an important figure in the history and exploration of Microtonal music and electroacoustic.-Biography:...
  
   (1917–1989)
• Erv Wilson
  Erv Wilson
  Ervin Wilson is a Mexican/American music theorist. Despite his avoidance of academia, Wilson has been influential on those interested in microtonal music and just intonation, especially in the areas of scale, keyboard, and notation design...
  
   (b. 1928)
• Joel Mandelbaum
  Joel Mandelbaum
  Joel Mandelbaum is an American music composer and teacher, best known for his use of microtonal tuning . He also has written the first Ph.D. dissertation on microtonality, in 1961. He is married to stained glass artist , and is the nephew of Abraham Edel.-Life & Music:Mandelbaum received his Ph.D...
  
   (b. 1932)
• James Tenney
  James Tenney
  James Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...
  
   (1934–2006)
• Clarence Barlow
  Clarence Barlow
  Clarence Barlow is a composer of classical and electroacoustic works.-Biography:Barlow was born in Calcutta, a member of the anglophone minority, of British and Portuguese descent...
  
   (b. 1945)
• Gene Ward Smith
  Gene Ward Smith
  Gene Ward Smith is an American mathematician and music theorist. In mathematics he has worked in the areas of Galois theory and Moonshine theory. In music theory, he is noted for a number of innovations in the theory of musical tuning, such as the introduction of multilinear algebra and for being...
  
   (b. 1947)
• Valeri Brainin
  Valeri Brainin
  Valeri Brainin , Russian/German musicologist, music manager, composer, and poet....
  
   (b. 1948)
• Jacques Dudon
  Jacques Dudon
  Jacques Dudon is a French just intonation composer and instrument builder. He is best known for developing a series of photosonic disk instruments in the 1980s that produced sound from modulated light Jacques Dudon is a French just intonation composer and instrument builder. He is best known for...
  
   (b. 1951)
• William Sethares
  William Sethares
  William A. Sethares is an American music theorist and professor of Electrical engineering and who is known primarily for his contributions to music theory, including dynamic tonality and a formalization of the source of consonance....
  
   (b. 1955)
• Georg Hajdu
  Georg Hajdu
  Georg Hajdu is a German composer of Hungarian descent. His work is dedicated to the combination of music, science and computer technology. He is noted for his opera Der Sprung – Beschreibung einer Oper and the network music performance environment Quintet.net.-Biography:Hajdu was born to Hungarian...
  
   (b. 1960)
• Bob Gilmore
  Bob Gilmore
  Bob Gilmore is a musicologist, educator and keyboard player, born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland in 1961. He studied at York University, England, Queen's University, Belfast , and, on a Fulbright Scholarship, at the University of California, San Diego...
  
   (b. 1961)
• Marc Sabat
  Marc Sabat
  Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer based in Berlin since 1999.-Works:He has made installations, video works and concert music pieces using acoustic instruments and, in some recent pieces, computer-generated electronics, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of small...
  
   (b. 1965)

External links

• Aikin, Jim. 2003. Jim Aikin's article on alternative tuning in electronic music
• Anon. [n.d.]. "Nicola Vicentino (1511–1576)". IVO: Sacred Music in the Italian Cinquecento outside Venice and Rome, edited by Chris Whent. Here Of A Sunday Morning website. (Accessed 19 August 2008)
• Chalmers, John. Dr. John Chalmers Divisions of the Tetrachord
• Loli, Charles. 2008. " Microtonalismo". (Article on alternative tuning in Peruvian music)
• Open Directory Project
  Open Directory Project
  The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...
  
   [n.d.] Microtonal Music
• Solís Winkler, Ernesto. 2004. "Julian Carrillo and the 13th Sound: A Microtonal Musical System". (Accessed 19 August 2008)
• Wilson, Erv
  Erv Wilson
  Ervin Wilson is a Mexican/American music theorist. Despite his avoidance of academia, Wilson has been influential on those interested in microtonal music and just intonation, especially in the areas of scale, keyboard, and notation design...
  
  . "Wilson Archives of papers on microtonal theory"
• Links to microtonal composers at Xenharmonic Wiki
• Links to microtonal projects around the world at Xenharmonic Wiki