Scales from eight living traditions, at their own pitches

A piano divides the octave into twelve equal steps. That is a Western answer to a Western problem, arrived at for good reasons, and it is the right tuning for the music built on top of it. It is simply not what a great deal of the world’s music does.

In Arabic maqam, several degrees sit roughly a quarter tone away from any key on that piano, and the tonic of a whole family of maqamat is one of them. Turkish makam theory divides the octave into fifty three commas rather than twelve semitones. A Javanese gamelan is tuned to itself, with its own octave slightly stretched, and no two gamelan agree. In Hindustani and Carnatic music the same degree in two different ragas is a different pitch, and that difference is a large part of how you tell the two ragas apart.

Software that offers you Hijaz as a row of twelve tone semitones is offering the shape without the tuning. It will sound like something, and a musician who knows the maqam will hear immediately that it is not this.

Every scale in it is a record with sources on it and an honest word for how sure those sources are, and there are three ways one of them arrives at its pitches.

Some carry their own figures. The Turkish makam entries are tuned from the fifty three comma theory the tradition writes itself down in. Where an Arabic maqam turns on a half flat degree, the note sounds there rather than on the nearest key: Rast, Bayati, Saba and the whole Sikah family are tuned, and Nahawand and Kurd are not, because they have nothing in them that needs it.

The Indian entries declare their tradition’s tuning rather than each spelling out its own. The Carnatic ones sit at the small whole number ratios above the tonic, which is the twenty two shruti system exactly. The Hindustani ones deliberately do not: they hold the flat degrees pure and leave the rest tempered, because when researchers pitch tracked hundreds of recordings from both traditions the two leaned measurably opposite ways. Giving Hindustani the shruti set would have made it less like itself, not more, and the library follows the measurement rather than tidying both into one rule.

Where a tuning is genuinely not one set of numbers, the entry says so. The gamelan scales are labelled an approximation in their own notes, with the measurements they were reduced from and the observation that no two gamelan are tuned alike. That variation is the tradition working properly rather than a fault waiting to be corrected, and a piece of software cannot ship the gamelan in the next village.

And where a scale’s own tuning is twelve equal semitones, it gets twelve equal semitones. That is what the Western and jazz scales are, and pushing them somewhere purer for the sake of consistency would be the same mistake in the other direction.

The deviation is applied to each note as it sounds, individually, so notes at different tunings can ring together and a bend on top of one does not pull it out of its own intonation. Everything Sonari plays with is tuned this way, from the first note.

The reference pitch is yours to set rather than fixed at 440, because Sa is chosen to suit the voice or the instrument in the room and always has been. There is a drone underneath, tuned to the key, and its companion tone comes from the scale’s own resting degrees rather than from an interval somebody picked. With pure tuning against that drone turned on, every note settles to its true interval above the tonic while the drone sounds, so a raga rings rather than beats. Where a raga’s own degrees carry an oscillation, that can be played too.

This is where a page like this usually stops, and stopping here is the thing worth being careful about. A raga is not a scale. A maqam is not a scale. Two makams can share every note and be different pieces of music, and a list of intervals cannot tell you which one you are in.

So most of the entries carry more than the notes: which degrees the tradition uses going up and which coming down, which of them carry the weight, where a phrase comes to rest, and the identifying phrase itself. The maqam entries carry the chain of ajnas the maqam is built from, the degree it pivots on to modulate, and the direction it conventionally develops in, which is exactly what keeps two makams with the same pitches from collapsing into one another. The entries that carry none of this are the ones that should not: a major scale has no aroha and no sayr, and slendro and pelog are tunings rather than modes.

Degrees are named in the tradition’s own vocabulary, and which vocabulary is decided by the scale rather than by a setting you have to remember. Sargam for Hindustani. The Carnatic swara names for Carnatic, where the same semitone is a different swara depending on where it sits in the scale, which is the reason a single table of twelve names cannot be used and is not.

None of that makes this a teacher. It is documented pitch material with performance practice recorded around it, and it will not tell you how a raga unfolds over forty minutes. What it does is stop the instrument being the thing in your way.

Inside Sonari, everywhere. Every sound it ships with plays the scale as tuned, so there is nothing to configure and nothing that quietly falls back to a piano.

On the way out, each note carries its own pitch individually, which an instrument that reads per note pitch will follow and one that does not will not. What Sonari sends is written out message by message if you need to know before you commit to it.

And it does not retune the instruments you already own. There is no tuning file to import and none to export. If you keep a library of Scala files, Sonari will not read it, and if you want your existing plugins in a shruti tuning this is not the thing that does it. What is here is a library you play, not a tuning server for a studio.

Set the degrees, tune each of them in cents if the scale needs it, name it, and it joins the library beside everything else. Finding one that is already in there is a matter of typing what you want in ordinary words rather than knowing its name. Sonari will also offer you a raga whose own sources place it at this hour and this season, read out of what the entries themselves say rather than from an association invented for a feature.

What you play them on comes from the same discipline. Instruments are named with the place they are from, and each one says what it is: a bansuri from India, an oud from Egypt and the Levant, an alboka from the Basque Country, and every one of them honestly labelled as inspired by the real instrument rather than as a recording of one.

Your hands, in the air, watched by the camera your Mac already has. Sonari can hold you inside the scale you chose so that the space between two notes is simply not there, which matters more here than it does on a keyboard: a scale whose degrees are not on the twelve familiar places is a scale you cannot find by muscle memory from another instrument. Playing without touching anything is the older idea this is built on, and it is a hundred years old.

Whatever you choose also reaches the picture. The kaleidoscope in the visuals can take its fold count from how many notes your scale has, and the colours are assigned by pitch, so a five note raga and a seven note maqam do not look like the same evening.