This is the book on tuning we have been waiting for. It was just released in July 2010 after more than a decade in preparation.

Cris Forster is an instrument designer, builder and composer who lives out in California. He’s originally from Brazil and has lived in Germany as well. Cris even spent time restoring the old Harry Partch instruments for the Harry Partch Foundation, and once packed them up and shipped them to Germany and back for a concert.

Cris is a very serious and conscientious guy who always does the best possible work. He’s a perfectionist and a rare craftsman in this regard. His instruments are each gorgeous works of art.

Cris has always been a microtonalist but for 12 of the last 20 years he has been researching tunings very intensively for the purpose of a book he was working on. It took ten years to research and write, and then it took another two years to format it, create all the hundreds of necessary diagrams and graphs, index it, footnote it, and get it published. That publication was just a few weeks ago, by Chronicle Books in San Francisco who has made a well made book physically, very well bound with sewn folios and high quality paper.

The book clearly reflects 12 years of work and is the most comprehensive book on tuning I have seen. For many years people have asked me if I know of a single excellent reference that will orient them in all this tuning stuff. There hasn’t before really been a single book that contained a real breadth of coverage, and much of the most interesting material, particularly regarding ethnomusicology, was buried in obscure out of print publications or extremely expensive references. Finally I have a single book I can unequivocally recommend. Whew. Thank goodness. At last.

It’s not just about tunings; the book begins with many chapters extensively discussing acoustic musical instrument physics, providing the solid foundation needed not just to build instruments, but to understand where scales came from and why we hear things the way we do.

It then moves through 200 pages on western tunings, with a comprehensive and extensively cited coverage of Ancient Greek music before heading into the history of Western European tunings that most of us are somewhat familiar with.

It finishes up with 400 pages of coverage of ethnic tunings covering four different major traditions: Chinese, Indian, Middle-Eastern (distinguishing between Arabic, Turkish and Persian), and Indonesian tuning systems, each which have unique approaches. There is coverage of Cris’ own instruments, a brief biography at the end, and also directions for building your own small harmonic canon, which will be helpful in understanding tunings in a direct and sensory way. The canon is referred to occasionally in the text with suggested experiments relevant to the tuning discussion.

The book is giant. Originally nearly 2000 pages long, the format of the book was reworked so it would fit into 1000 pages. The result is pretty dense text with long scan lines in a large and heavy book. If there is one thing that could have been done differently it would be to break this wonderful monster into a three volume set as reading it can be backbreaking work due to the sheer weight. But that would have increased the cost surely. Reading it pretty much needs to be done lying on the floor as holding it up will hurt your wrists after a while. Just letting you know that you get your money’s worth with this book; it has so much useful information.

One tip is to bookmark the footnotes at the end of each chapter and read them in tandem. In addition to the usual citation information which comprises most of the footnotes, the notes also have quite a bit of secret and fascinating information in them that probably would have distracted from the flow of the text if placed in line. Reading these is like going down the rabbit hole though. I quickly was led off into other references and found I was spending days and days following up on interesting things I didn’t know about just to advance a single page in the book.

Cris’s style is dry. There’s not a lot of blatant humor here or hilarious anecdotes. If you crave that sort of stuff there are other books that can be used as a supplement. But it’s also not useless or obscure and impenetrable academic information like we see in so many of those journal articles and university theses about scales that come out nowadays which try to make tuning into some sort of incredibly abstract thought experiment. In contrast to that, the math in here is necessary and describes real things. There are formulas or numbers on almost every page, but much of this is because he doesn’t skip steps but tries to explain everything in detail. The math is junior high or high school level depending on where you went to school. Possibly elementary level if you went to school outside the US. You need to know fractions, multiplication, division, and a little about logarithms. No calculus. It’s not pure math formulas for page after page either, I don’t want to give the wrong idea. There is a great deal of historical information as well that is clearly relevant to the history and use of tuning. In fact, the math serves these parts rather than the other way around.

As to whether you should get this book or not there is no question: you should get it. You’re here on this site, you have an interest in tuning, you probably have written or performed microtonal music, well oh yes oh my certainly you definitely should be getting this one without a doubt. It’s a brilliant work of scholarship by someone who really knows what he is talking about. We have really needed someone to take this approach and spend the time needed to assemble all this information in just such a giant book and present it in a straightforward, conscientious and accurate manner. Eventually you are going to buy it and if you wait too long it could go out of print since this is definitely specialist fare and not for the general reading public. I recall years ago I bought the other giant red book of tuning, Owen Jorgensen’s amazing manual of bearing plans and common practice tuning history called “Tuning”. It was about the same price, just under $70. Couldn’t afford it at the time as I was a starving student, but I bought it anyway. Nowadays “Tuning” runs $250-$700 for copies in poor to middling condition assuming you can find it at all. So, you should get it right now. And you should not be surprised if it takes you 10 years to read if you do it like I am doing, one page at a time, trying to absorb everything.

I’ve been going through the Greek and non-western sections and the coverage is excellent and just the sort of specific and accurate detail I have been craving for so long. I am so glad this book has at last been published and I think you will be as well.

Here is Cris’ web site which has several sample chapters as well as more information about his work: Chrysalis Foundation

[Musical Mathematics, On the Art and Science of Acoustic Instruments at Amazon]

Harry Partch built all his own instruments, invented his own scales, and is one of the most important figures in american music, and is the most important historical figure in modern microtonality. This book covers his philosophies, his rantings, the history of tuning starting with the ancient greeks and chinese, technical descriptions of the instruments he invented, and performance notes on his operas.

Some of the theory, particularly his ideas about psychoacoustics, have been superseded by more contemporary research. But that doesn’t matter at all because the ideas he had all proceeded from his ear and not his theorizing and thus remain completely musically valid.

This book, particularly the historical and ranting sections, is a blast to read. Lots of fun. You’ll be highlighting or underlining every page, laughing with Harry, and trying to remember the marvelously erudite ways in which he says things.

It doesn’t matter what your field of interest is. You need this book. This is a book by a microtonalist which I can recommend to everyone and anyone with no hesitation.

[Genesis of a Music at Amazon]

What makes a set of notes sound dissonant or consonant when played together? It depends strongly not just on the tuning used but the timbre as well.

Over the years there has been a lot of academic music theory papers about consonance and dissonance. Most of them are nonsensical, dense, obscure, wrong, and can be disregarded.

The works and research of Bill Sethares though can not be disregarded because they are the first time someone understood everything and explained it clearly.

Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale is not only the most important book about tuning written to date, but it is the most important book about music theory written in human history.

An understanding of the relationship between timbre and tuning is a prerequisite for really understanding music. Since this book was published, the bar has been raised. If you are not familiar with this material, you don’t yet understand the theory of music.

Yes, this book is expensive, it is full of math, and it is challenging to read. However, it is not complex for its own sake or to intimidate, but to explain the truth as precisely as possible.

There is a great bibliography and discography included, as well as a CD of musical examples.

Rather than get into great detail about it, you just need to read it and understand it. If you don’t want to spend the cash, most of the key insights are available in articles freely available on the author’s site.

[Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale at Amazon]

This fine little book is currently in print and is rather inexpensive. Essentially this book is about ways in which to visualize musical dyads.

Ashton notes that this not the original Harmonograph book from the 1800s, but he found that old book and reprinted its diagrams with his own notes. The diagrams were made over 100 years ago using a mechanical device called a harmonograph, which is a contraption with pendulums that is able to draw waveforms and patterns.

The book is not full of deep tuning insights, but it is delightful and worthwhile nonetheless. There is information about a few basic just intonation intervals, and a table of basic intervals in the appendix.

A fun vacation project might be to make one of the old mechanical harmonographs. Directions on how to do so are included in the book, and also an overview of how to make a Kaleidophone, and how to make Chladni Patterns by bowing a metal plate covered with sand.

If you have a Mac, I have a program called IntervalCalc that will create one of the types of harmonographs discussed in the book.

[Harmonograph at Amazon]

This book is in textbook form and is nicely put together, with plenty of diagrams and discussion. Mathieu believes that 12tET is a good tuning to use because it approximates many just intervals and the ear is able to warp the mistuned degrees of 12 into actually hearing the just intervals themselves.

I don’t agree with Mathieu’s basic thesis there, but even so, this is a thoughtfully produced book, a labor of love, and a lot of people really dig it.

Mathieu spends a lot of time teaching the reader to sing various intervals, and to breath and feel and experience the subtleties of each interval. This is good training and a productive approach. Music is fundamentally a spiritual, mystical science — something where I do agree in total with Mathieu, who studied the teachings of the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan. Khan’s insights into music are gathered in a collection of essays titled “The Mysticism of Sound and Music”, which I recommend to those interested in that subject.

I also feel an affinity towards Mathieu when he points out that infants and animals can not distinguish octaves: that it is a learned skill. Yum to that!

The exercises are so good and the production values so high that I would say that this book is worth getting, despite my disagreement with his central thesis. You will get maximum value from it if you plan to go through the exercises and really try to feel and experience the harmonies on an intuitive, visceral level, an approach I deeply respect.

[Harmonic Experience at Amazon]