Western music is based on the octave- which despite the name is based on 12 evenly-spaced notes per doubling of frequency. However some Indian music has not only the “half-steps” (chromatic steps) of the Western scale, it also has “quarter-steps.” I personally can’t hear quarter steps.
The modern name for this concept of cutting the octave into different-sized pieces for each note is “microtonal.” Some of the instruments used to make this music are really wild.Here’s a short list of some of the sites I have been looking at :
Galleries and Lists:- OddMusic Instrument Gallery
- John Starrett’s List of Links which is a little out of date- some of the links are broken.
Instruments:
- The Chrysalis
- Starr Labs’ “Z-Board”
- “The Huygens-Fokker Foundation promotes the spread of microtonal music in all its manifestations”
- Experimental Musical Instruments
Composition theory:
- Making Microtonal Music
- Graham’s Microtonal Website
- Microtonal Synthesis
- A page on “Lucy Tuning”, a kind of weird cyclical tuning method
- Lambdoma, which is supposedly based on Pythagorean principles