The purpose of this program is to be useful to musicians like yourself and allow you to set up any kind of fixed tuning for your instruments easily and even integrate with your music sequencer, etc. It is also to help you compare, analyze, organize, and visualize your tunings and to be able to see the effects of changes by including functions to help you work with some common types of scale manipulations, without having to know all kinds of details about math or technical information about the internal tuning formats used by each different instrument.

Intentionally left out of this purpose is to have special functions to do every conceivable thing that is possible mathematically. If you need to do that, you can still do it using an appropriate general purpose mathematical tool like a spreadsheet, or Mathematica, or Maple. You can still use the results of your explorations in LMSO and use LMSO to catalog and store and transmit and manipulate and visualize those tunings once you’ve come up with them using whatever mathematical method you like.

That’s not to say that LMSO is mathematically ignorant. To the contrary, any place you can type a number you can also type a mathematical function. For example, you can choose to write the ratio 15/8 as 3/2 * 5:4. And you can specify the interval of the pure fifth in cents as either (log(3/2) / log(2^(1/1200))), or as ratio_to_cents(3/2). And to change 700 to 701, you can click anywhere on the number and press the up arrow on the keyboard. Or press an arrow with the shift key to go up or down in steps of 10. There’s all kinds of stuff included to make playing around with the mathematical part of scales much more easy and fun rather than tedious and uninspiring.

Having a fine crafted violin to play doesn’t mean that it is no good because it does not play itself. Similarly, saying that LMSO is meant to be easy to use and that it will vastly simplify the work of tuning musical instruments, while opening up new possibilities doesn’t mean that the program will read your mind and make your job completely effortless. To use LMSO you need to know enough to open a file and select the instrument to send it to -- you thus need to know as much as it takes to turn on a synthesizer and select patches. LMSO is a musical instrument -- a tool. A good tool makes it easier for you to express yourself artistically and can be understood by a beginner, but still takes time and energy to master if that’s what you want to do.

If you want to go further and fiddle with scales or make your own, it’s like making new patches on a synth -- you have to know a little bit about tuning so you know what you are doing. But LMSO does keep away unneeded math details, for example the handling of mathematical expressions discussed above. That helps you to experiment, fool around, and learn as you go. But the fact is that tunings do involve numbers at some point so you need to know what numbers are and have an idea what doing multiplication accomplishes musically (multiplying two ratios together is how you add the musical intervals that they represent -- so a fourth (4:3) and a fifth (3:2) added together make an octave (2:1) because 4:3 * 3:2 = 12:6 = 2:1). LMSO can not make it so simple that you can be totally ignorant and still know enough to do anything you want, though you can be totally in the dark and still be able to load tunings that other people have made into your synth with no problem.

Functions that do clever and complicated things like the Interactive Quantize and Knead & Fold Kitchen Appliances all have graphical displays so that just by fiddling around, you can see exactly what is the effect of your changes and start to guess how they work even if you don’t know every detail. In fact, by playing around with these, you’ll probably start to pick up on the lingo and see what the big deal is with all the talk about ratios and cents values, meantones, linear temperaments, MOS scales and the like, because you’ll gain experience actually seeing in LMSO and hearing through your synth what is really going on.

LMSO does not have tons of esoteric functions that spew out reports full of numbers that not everyone is sure have much musical relevance. If you need to do that, you may want to go ahead and look into Mathematica or Maple. The focus of LMSO is to be useful to most musicians, especially those interested in microtonality, or ethnic instruments, or historically accurate performance, or those who want to explore new realms of harmonies and melodies, or put that extra edge on their music that really makes people’s ears perk up and take note. LMSO does that without restricting what is possible or making any assumptions, even though it may not do everything that is theoretically possible all by itself. There is no need for LMSO to try to compete with general purpose mathematical programs because those things already work great, and can easily be integrated with LMSO for those who have the interest.