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• John Starrett’s List of Links which is a little out of date- some of the links are broken.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

Web link of note: World Instrument Gallery
(At http://www.asza.com/ihm.shtml)

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