My interest in tuning

As a composer, I got turned on to extended just intonation through my exposure to the works of Harry Partch about 1986. I had been doing direct software synthesis through the courtesy of the Columbia Computer Music studio (this was before you could do high quality direct software synthesis on the desktop) and immediatly set about building character based interfaces to simulations of several of Partch's instruments. These were built on top of my copy of Paul Lansky's CMIX, originally on Sun 3 and later ported to NeXT. I've also hack the Ensemble app on NeXT to work with my tuning files; which gave me real-time input for the first time.

I have several cassette tapes available of these works, send email if you have an interest.

While extended just intonation was my personal interest (here I feel I must add that my interest is from a musical point of view, I don't get a lot out of the huge graphs that many in the Just Intonation community get such a kick out of - it may be just, but I don't bother to justify it!) a few years back I was contacted by Ross Abell, who has been obsessed for years with the mean tone systems of the French Baroque composers. I've been sucked deeper and deeper into his project, much to the detriment of my own composition but sometimes to the delight of my ears. Ross has some funny theories and a lot of interesting tuning systems that he has derived from year of research. It's been a lot of fun to grab Bach fugues off the MIDI archives and try them in various tunings.

At this time, this tuning archive is barely begun, but over time I will be adding my tunings and Ross's, and some articles and papers and other neat stuff. If you have anything to share send it along and I'll try to include it.