Quote:

---

But what about the notes in between these notes? If we hummed a ‘glissando’, or ‘slide’ between these notes, what would those notes be called?

Those are microtones. But what makes them different, and why are they not a standard part of the music we hear on a daily basis?

---

Quote:

---

The most useful dictionary definition of microtone that we’ve found is in the in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which describes it as “any musical interval or difference of pitch distinctly smaller than a semitone”, going on to give examples of divisions of the octave into more than 12 parts, and musics of ancient Greece and beyond.

Microtonal music is therefore music written to include microtones as well, or instead, of standard tones and semitones.

In the glossary on his Rest Is Noise website, music critic Alex Ross defines microtonal music as “music that uses intervals smaller than the semitone, or uses a tuning system other than the equal-tempered system that has been standard in Western music for the last couple of centuries.”

They have the potential to sound like ‘out of tune’ notes to ears used to Western music, especially when heard alongside the conventional notes of the piano keyboard.

---

Quote:

---

Where does the term microtone originate?

Confusingly, quarter tone was – and still is at times – used as shorthand to refer to any note smaller than a semitone, but it’s not really specific enough.

The Irish violinist, singer, writer, and authority on Indian music, Maud MacCarthy, was one of the turn-of-the-century thinkers who needed a way to expand music vocabulary to correctly categorise the notes with tiny intervals between them heard in the music she was exposed to. In Indian classical music the word ‘shruti’ defines a microtonal note that sits outside the pitches heard in standard Western music, and in around 1912 MacCarthy landed on using the term ‘microtone’ to translate the concept into English language.

Before that, as early as 1895, Mexican composer Julián Carrillo, had used the more specific terms ‘microtone’ and ‘microtonality’ when referring to music using notes outside the standard 12-note scale.

And other composers have come up with definitions for the notes in between the notes, including the Russian composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who used the term ‘ultra-chromatic’ to refer to any intervals smaller than a semitone, and ‘infra-chromatic’ for intervals that are larger than a semitone.

Theorist Marek Žabka liked to use ‘subchromatic’ while American composer Ivor Darreg has opted for ‘xenharmonic’ to refer to his system of scales using notes outside the standard notes of the modern piano.

---