Sure, the outfits are hilariously baffling. The mystique curiously alluring. The frantic antics and manic-yet-precise playing at times jaw-dropping. But for music nerds, the real marvel of the Québécois duo Angine de Poitrine is its arrestingly masterful microtonality. As you may know, Khn de Poitrine’s doubleneck guitar-bass is crammed with frets, lousy with them, twice as many as usual—a double-double (or, as they say in Quebec, a double-double). Where the familiar Western music scale has 12 notes in an octave, each note a half-tone step from the next, his instruments go to 24, each regular fret split by another, making quarter-tones.
Yes, it sounds weirdly cool. And you love it. And if so, you want to hear more of this kind of thing. We are here to help! Microtones abound, from ancient tunings around the world to modern experiments and innovations. There are as many variations on this, as many theories of tonality, as there are notes between the notes, which, technically, are infinite.
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Harry Partch. (Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
There are Indian ragas, Middle Eastern maqams, Indonesian gamelan, Japanese koto, West African kora, and Central African balafon. There are debates engaged with religious fervor: the strict orthodoxy of the A440 12-tone scale versus the apostasy of just intonation, or the Pythagorean comma versus. the syntonic comma. There’s well-tempered tuning, equal temperament, meantone temperament—it sounds like psychology, not musicology, and sometimes it feels like it. You can find YouTube video after video explaining all this, even “Bach: The Animated Series,” featuring a cartoon Johann Sebastian explaining how the scales Baroque down in his time. Ha ha.
But never mind the theory, the music is what it’s about. Some of it’s frantic, some static. But once you open your mind and your ears to things that might sound, at first, a bit off, you might come to think the idea of limiting the scale to 12 notes is what seems arbitrary and weird. So let’s go and find those notes between the notes and break free from the tyranny of tonality:
Greeking out
Is there a Platonic ideal of tonality? An Olympian scale? Homeric harmonics? Based on surviving fragments of musical notations and descriptions in literature of the times, it seems to be the case. Ancient Greek music provided the foundation for Western music to come (the very word music is derived from the Muses, Zeus’ arty daughters, and the modes of Western music theory still have Greek names). And the scales developed over the centuries of the rise and fall of classical Greek civilization point to sounds familiar today. But they veer enticingly from the tunings we know into haunting echoes from Orpheus, and he’s no lyre.
Listen: Athens musician Petros Tabouris and his ensemble have thoroughly explored the wealth of Greek musical antiquity in dozens or recordings. Fragments of Ancient Greek Music is a great starting point with this piece rich with our coveted microtones.
Ragas to riches
22 intervals in an octave, in general. The system known as shrutis (going back at least 23 centuries) is built on notes meant to be toyed with, bent up and down to create the melisma familiar in Indian music and convey great ranges of emotion.. Thanks to the Beatles and Ravi Shankar, those sounds became familiar in Western pop (and classical) music, but were too often used in limited, way too frequently clichéd contexts (ooooh! mystical!). But there is a lot of variety of Indian music to be explored, from Hindustani to Carnatic, from classical traditions to Bollywood to folk.
Watch and listen: Shankar and his sitar are the general go-to, but if you don’t know Shankar’s sometime-collaborator Ali Akbar Khan and his sarod, a smaller, fretless cousin, you’re in for a treat. This performance, with Khan accompanied by his then-young son, tabla master Zakir Hussain, is a delight. (Hussain, who died in 2024, was a frequent partner with such jazz and rock greats as John McLaughlin and the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, and his vast catalog is well worth investigating too.)
Maqam along, everybody
Music from the Arabic cultures is known for its quarter-tone scales, 24 per octave. But even a cursory survey of the music, from Iraq to Morocco and across time and styles from the medieval Moors’ ceremonial compositions to Quranic chants to 21st century jazz electronic Syrian wedding music, shows that there are far more than 24. These much finer divisions are expressed throughout the many maqams—not just the scales by various approaches to playing them—that are the basis of the music, somewhat comparable to Indian ragas. There are many places to start exploring, but perhaps the classical and folk traditions of Iraq and Iran are the best to try first.
Listen: Maqam Rast, performed by an Iraqi ensemble featuring vocalist Yusuf Omar.
Bang a gong, gamelan
Making a lot from a little, Indonesian gamelans—ensembles centered on tuned inverted metal bowls and sort-of xylophones—use scales of just five and seven tones spread evenly across an octave.Gamelan comes in two geographic forms. Javanese, from the Indonesian capital island, tends to be courtly and airy. Balinese, from the smaller Hindu isle, is often rawer, and features bright, exciting bursts or metallic clashes. Both, with their incredibly precise, interlocking patterns and mosaics of sounds, have had profound impact on modern Western music, from Claude Debussy (inspired by seeing a Javanese group at the Paris Exposition), Benjamin Britten (a visit to Bali led to him making piano transcriptions of pieces and borrowing sensibilities for his own compositions) to Lou Harrison (who wrote for his own American gamelan ensemble) and Steve Reich (whose own musical mosaics sport gamelan-derived shimmer)) to Danny Elfman (who incorporated a home-made gamelan into the early music of the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo troupe) and Mickey Hart (who studied gamelan and recorded and released a comprehensive set of contemporary Balinese gamelan composers in the mid-1990s).
Watch and listen: Classic gamelan, captured in Ubud, Bali.
Partched
Composer Harry Partch was a restless guy—he spent much of the Depression hoboing around the U.S.. He was musically restless too. In a life-long rebellion against constrictions of convention, he created his own microtonal scales (deeply indebted to his intensive studies of ancient Greek music) and invented and built his own instruments to play them, from a Chromatic Organ with 43 notes per octave to a wider range of idiosyncratic string and tuned percussion constructions with such names as the Spoils of War, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl, which incorporated liquor bottles and a hubcap. With these, and with equally distinctive writing for vocals, he created compositions ranging from massive, opera-level stage works to short settings of inscriptions left by hitchhikers on a highway railing near Barstow (“You lucky women! All you have to do is find me”). He did not find much of an audience in his lifetime (he died in 1974), but he has come to be embraced as one of the essential, if eccentric, American composers of the 20th century.
Listen: The 1969 album The World of Harry Partch offers a strong snapshot of his music (with a second disc featuring him demonstrating many of his instruments). The opener, “Daphne of the Dunes,” composed for a 1958 film re-setting the myth of Daphne and Apollo, has an energy that should appeal to Angine fans.
Minimalmaxxing
Terry Riley’s “A Rainbow in Curved Air” and John Cage’s sonatas for prepared piano are crucial pieces in microtonality in what, perhaps erroneously, came to be called minimalist music. But the magnum opus of microtonal minimalism may well be La Monte Young’s “The Well-Tuned Piano,” with improvisations on a piano with just intonation tuning going on hours per performance, each presentation not a new piece but more a continuation of something meant to extend into infinity. That concept was embodied in his 1960s Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble which included, among others, John Cale on viola, before he was in, and clearly influencing, the Velvet Underground. But Young, now 90, continued to expand and refine his approaches throughout his life.
Watch and listen: Short of experiencing it live, the best account available is Young captured in a 1987 video that, while not eternal, runs a full 6 hours and 25 minutes—complete with pop-up ads that are at once interruptive and yet somehow perfect.
Gloriosity
In the modern classical world, microtones aren’t just for minimalists and the avant-garde. A number of composers who have worked at least somewhat closer to established forms have also embraced the freedom of working outside the 12 tones, some with spectacular results. Iannis Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez are among the biggest names. Finnish artist Kaija Saariaho, who died in 2023, made some gripping music. Perhaps none have explored the possibilities of tossing out tonal borders more dedicatedly than Gloria Coates, born in Wisconsin but living most of her life in Germany until her death, also in 2023 at age 89. Her compositions are often marked by her love of long, slow glissandi, string instruments sliding, sometimes languorously, sometimes dramatically, up and down in ways that can be haunting and disorienting, but always captivating and entrancing. Microtonal? This is polytonal.
Watch and listen: Coates’ symphonies show her musical imagination and sensibilities to great effect, but her string quartets and chamber pieces are the essential core of her work. This 2025 performance of her String Quartet No. 7, titled Angels, saw the lineup multiplied alongside a pipe organ, bringing the celestial sounds to great heights.
Jazzed up
Inspired by Indian shrutis, young composer-keyboardist Phillip Golub has put 22 notes to his octave, and he’s going to use them all. A lot. The rushes of cascading notes in his “Loyalty Oath,” the opening piece of his new Partisan Ship album, bear the mania of Angine at its most maniacal. For this, Golub assembled a band including trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who has made his own deep dives into microtonal music, inspired a great deal by Iraqi maqams, and five-string violinist Layale Chaker. But where ElSaffar’s New Quartet centers its microtonality on re-tuned piano played by Tania Giannouli , Golub uses a complex digital keyboard instrument called a Flexichord. The album is not always as frenetic as the opening piece, but it’s consistently bracing. Different sides of Golub can be found on three other new releases: his own Loop 7, a more genteel piece built on a repeated brief piano figure; Dream Brigade, a duo with percussionist Lesley Mok, and as part of a trio on a new album from composer Mario Layne Fabrizio.
Listen to “Loyalty Oath”
Cold-blooded
Leave it to a lizard wizard to be creative with scales. King Gizzard and that mystical reptile have dedicated three full albums to just that. After teasing with a little bit of the form on 2016’s Nonagon Infinity, the prolific Aussie psychedelic eclecticists went headlong into the realm with 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, with customized guitars and the reed instrument zurna (common to cultures throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa) and a lot of inspiration from Turkish forms to create a distinctive air. K.G. (late 2020) and L.W. (early 2021) completed the Explorations into Microtonal Tuning trilogy. Among the enthusiastic fans of these sets are—you guessed it—our pals Khn and Klek, the Angine duo, who have cited this as a key influence, and who have even been rumored to be members of the Lizard Wizard in disguise. As it happens, Angine is on the bill of King Gizzard’s Field of Vision festival being held in Colorado in August. Don’t expect that to clear up the identity issue, of course.
Watch and listen: The band performed the entire Microtonal Banana album in a 2021 Melbourne concert, the whole thing captured on video for our great micro-pleasure.
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