Adaptive Tuning Systems
Music theorists have struggled for centuries, creating various optimal tunings constructed of tempered just intervals, to facilitate transposition and modulation of musical material in all 12 keys. The tuning of the modern piano in 12-ET is a compromise of just intervals. This is no longer necessary with the advent of today's interactive computer technology. I am developing a Theory of Context Specific Temperament that tempers a pitch (at a given instance within a musical passage) only in relationship to other simultaneously sounding pitches. Tempering is only of the sounding pitches of a chord, which results in a better approximation of just intervals within the chord than possible in static 12-ET. As new pitches are added to or removed from the harmony of the music, the temperaments are recalculated and the tuning adjusted in real-time. Currently, I am exploring weighting schemes on Excel Spreadsheets, and I have working MAX Patches and a C++ application that support Context Specific Temperament on MIDI synthesizers. I am translating these MIDI prototypes into programs that retune acoustic sources in real-time, such as individual voices in a woodwind quintet, according to information from score tracking-algorithms and extracted from audio data.