We’ve been listening to music with the same 12 notes for hundreds of years, thanks to 18th century Europeans. Our music should reflect how times have changed.
Relyt R’s Xuixo EP features dance music in 19-, 21-, and 33-tone equal temperament to explore harmonies and melodies outside of C, C#, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G, Ab, A, Bb, and B.
Techno is often in 12-tone (melodic or atonal), or with ‘randomly’ pitched sounds chosen by taste (Berlin style). With microtonal tunings, you can explore the space between these two extremes and systematically make your sounds as avant-garde or alien as desired. This was the principle used to create Xuixo EP.
In addition to using non-Western tuning systems, Xuixo EP was assembled in part by variegated algorithmic processes to sculpt adventurous and energetic rhythmic and timbral musical landscapes, then further emulsified with the danceable frameworks of techno and house.
The algorithmic sonic fabrication process was catalyzed by the live-coding musical pattern language TidalCycles (used in live-performances) and a custom machine learning pipeline for clustering audio samples by acoustic similarity. While computational methods facilitated the composition and sound design, the primary focal point is use of characteristic microtonal scales (19, 21, and 33 notes per octave, and 12-near-equal just intonation), whose use has not been widely adopted in music throughout global human cultures