Microtonal Ambient Music - 19TET

This simple ambient music uses 19-tone equal temperament and was an experiment in a keyboard mapping where I arranged the notes in fifths, so notes close to each other on the keyboard sound good together, and minimal thinking is required to play in any key or modulate between them. I arbitrarily shifted some notes up or down an octave so they all fit within about two octaves of each other. It makes it easy to think harmonically, but not so much melodically, but that was an interesting limitation to impose that worked well for this kind of music.

The layout also lead to some interesting harmonic ideas, like expanding outwards in fifths to create more complex and dissonant tonalities, which happens at the beginning. I just used five adjacent notes to begin with, which form a major pentatonic scale, but I gradually add the rest in to form a massive nineteen-note cluster, before returning to the original five notes. The next section centres around those original five notes (played by underwater-sounding pianos) while a simple sine pad noodles around in a similar tonal area before wandering further and further away, quite literally by moving up and down the keyboard. In the third and final section, the harmony simply drifts through the complete circle of fifths a few times, cycling through all nineteen major chords while gradually morphing into noise.

Compared to what is possible with specialised isometric keyboards, this system is very basic, but I found it to be a good option for working with 19TET on a regular keyboard with manageable enough quirks that serve as interesting creative parameters.

The microtonal virtual instruments I used were Xenharmonic FMTS and Xenfont, both by Xen-Arts: https://plugins4free.com/dev/254/
The metallic tinkling sound is a coil gong I made - demo here:    • Spinning Coil Gong - scrap metal musical i...  

The artwork is an edited AI-generated image from Artbreeder.com