Temperaments vs PentaMonochord

Temperaments: Tune your music and your ears. Temperaments is an application for learning about musical tunings and temperaments used throughout history. Want to play Bach in a tuning he actually used? Would you like to try early music as it was heard at the time? How about composing new music with an unconventional tuning? Temperaments tunes your music and your ears. Temperaments uses MIDI to retune your music on the fly. You can play any standard MIDI file, apply a temperament, and hear the result in real time. You can connect an external keyboard, let Temperaments retune your performance, and send it to any synthesizer you choose. You can even record your music to standard MIDI files and export them to play on any sequencer. Your recordings can be sent to anyone via email. They can be dropped onto Dropbox, and you can tell the world about them on Facebook, all from within Temperaments. Temperaments includes twenty six temperaments in addition to Equal Temperament, with both meantone and unequal-interval types. You can switch back to Equal Temperament instantly just by pressing a button for instant comparison - even while notes are sounding. You can even change to an entirely different temperament instantly, any time, even in the middle of a performance. Temperaments includes a large, expandable display showing the differences between Equal Temperament and a chosen temperament. And, of course, you can select any note to be the root key of any temperament, so that your temperament matches the key of any file or performance. Use Temperaments to learn about nonstandard tunings. Use Temperaments to compose new music in unusual ways. Or experiment with applying a temperament to your MIDI files. Any way you want to use it, Temperaments tunes your music and your ears.

The Pythagoreans’ foremost innovation was to correlate pitch relationships to calibrated speaking lengths of a string on a monochord. Now, for the first time, there’s an app for that! Use IntervalBlocks to build a two-octave G pentatonic scale on the PentaMonochord using only octaves and fifths. Touch any block to see and hear its interval again, and watch the Hertz box to see how the frequencies of the two notes relate inversely to the string lengths represented by the IntervalBlock. Touch the note labels any time to play a pentatonic tune. Press “Switch to Game” to join the Pythagorean pantheon by building the whole scale with the minimum number of steps. The Intro and the Background Information explain the monochord system in detail, and the Timeline puts it all in perspective.