DESCRIPTION:
A microtonal version of John Williams's Cantina Band from the film Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

Most people are completely unfamiliar with microtonal music and can find it difficult to listen to, so I wanted to experiment in a way that is (hopefully) more accessible by adapting a familiar tune. The fact that the cantina musicians are supposedly alien is another justification. If you could manage to listen to the entire piece, I'd love to know.


Although 'alternative' tuning systems exist in many cultures, the Western twelve-interval equal-division-of-the-octave (12EDO) is by far the most prominent tuning system. 12EDO is ideal as it approximates the intervals of the naturally-occurring harmonic series, uses the minimum number of notes to do so, and allows each key to sound good. Earlier western music divided the octave into 12 unequal intervals so that the harmonic series was more accurately preserved in some keys, though other keys suffered badly as a result. In practice, Western classical music is a combination of both kinds of systems (except in the case of pianos or other fixed-pitch instruments) as performers will subtly adjust the pitches to be closer to the intervals of the harmonic series, but without straying too far from equal temperament.

There have been plenty of equal and unequal temperaments proposed, such as 19EDO which is a more 'in-tune' version of 12EDO, though the keyboard layouts in the video demonstrates the awkwardness of scales with many notes. By the way, these keyboard layouts (most of which are not my suggestions) are meant to be as logical as possible: they aim for eight 'white' keys per octave (including the repeated octave) which produce notes resembling the familiar major scale as closely as the scale permits. Scales based around two or more octaves must make more compromises, e.g. 5.5EDO, which is actually a division of two octaves into eleven equal intervals. The hexagonal keyboard shown near the end is actually less nonsensical than it appears - it is inspired by an isomorphic MIDI keyboard designed for 12EDO (and more) that allows interval patterns to be transposed much more easily than the standard piano keyboard, which is a bit goofy when you think about it…



Percussion was realised in Sibelius 7
All other instruments were realised using the microtonally-compatible virtual instruments IVOR and IVOR2