Microtones

From This Might Be A Wiki

Songs that make use of microtones — musical intervals smaller than a semitone, or notes outside the standard 12-tone equal temperament system used in most Western music.

Background[edit]

John Flansburgh and John Linnell were introduced to microtonal music in 1981 or 1982 by their friend David Lindsay, who they briefly played in a trio with prior to the formation of They Might Be Giants. Flansburgh recalled in a 1996 interview: "Dave and John were really intensely interested in microtonal music and I really felt like I wasn't up for that. I just didn't have enough musical experience to start fooling around with microtonality, which is a really complicated and kind of odd thing." At around this time, Linnell modified the internal circuitry of his Micromoog synthesizer to play in 24-tone equal temperament tuning. This modification almost destroyed the instrument, though the band managed to record at least one microtonal song with it, "Heptone".[1] In a 2022 interview with KMSU's They Might Be Playing They Might Be Giants, Linnell spoke about his interest in microtonal music:

John and I moved into this apartment when we were first moving to New York and there was this guy named David Lindsay, who we wound up playing music with. The three of us played together a bunch. He had done this thing which was out of complete left field for me — he played an upright acoustic bass and he had taken nail polish and applied it to the fretboard of the bass, showing where all these scale tones were that he could put his fingers on, which were those in-between-the-cracks notes. He was using different colored nail polish to do this, so he could see what he was doing. When we first went to his apartment and he showed us the bass, I was like, "What the hell is that?" He explained it and he showed me a book he was reading by Mr. Harry Partch, who is one of the original popularizers of microtonality.
Harry Partch was someone who made his own instruments. He was a gifted carpenter and builder and he was able to build an orchestra's worth of microtonal instruments. He wrote this wonderful book which I just devoured after Dave loaned it to me. I still have my copy that I eventually got, it's called Genesis of a Music by Harry Partch. It's mostly about his adventures in microtonality but he also gives a whole elaborate history of the evolution of Western music. And he goes into all the mathematics of his personal 43-tone scale that he created. It's a whole universe of stuff. I was 20 or something and I just got way into it, to the point where I almost destroyed my synthesizer by trying to modify it so it could play microtones. I got the extra electronics to patch back into it, to try and change the tuning of it. At some point I finally shorted its brains out by doing that. But that's just how obsessed I was with this at that time.

The band have used microtonal tunings infrequently in the past, though Linnell experimented with it on some of the instrumental tracks from his 1996 solo EP House Of Mayors. In recent years, the band have been incorporating microtonality more often into their work. Flansburgh discussed the use of microtones on the song "I Haven't Been Right Yet" in a 2018 interview:

John has this microtonal fixation. I'm a little bit more skeptical of how awesome micronality is. Although, it's an interesting fresh breeze when you do it. We did this interesting musical handoff where he gave me a bunch of chords in a microtonal form. I feel like that with the way it’s dealt with in the track is actually super vivid and not exactly hard on the ears. It's a fun musical song. But, it's sort of dragging in something that you would probably only hear in an art music setting. I don't know of any popular music being made with microtonality right now. I guess we get a little bit of pleasure being a cultural Trojan Horse. We can bring in ideas that don't happen even on the left hand side of the dial!

Alternate tunings[edit]

Songs written using microtonal tuning systems rather than standard 12-tone equal temperament.

Microtonal elements[edit]

Songs primarily in standard 12-tone tuning that incorporate microtonal/out of tune effects or instruments.

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