Looking at our new color pallet

Slicing up the Octave into Sixteen Parts

Before we begin our journey to understand and play in a different tuning, we should first roughly understand what we mean when we say split the octave into 16 parts. Think of an octave as a loaf of something good like french bread. mmmm  Now, imagine cutting the bread in such a way that all pieces including the ends are the same size. In our case, the french bread, or italian bread or whatever, would be cut into 12 pieces. On on each end, and 10 in the middle.  Now, let's say we wanted to cut the bread into 16 pieces, all the same size. That would leave one on each end and 14 in the middle. That's alot smaller pieces! The term, "Microtonal" would refer to any loaf of bread that has pieces smaller than than one-twelfth of a piece of bread. As weird as it sounds, our bread (tuning scale) of 12 equal pieces is the standard by which we measure EVERYTHING else. Wow! Anyway, now we have a loaf of bread with 16 equal pieces. We could have taken the bread before we sliced into twelve and cut each slice in half making 24 equally sized pieces but that's another blog post. :D     Moving on, now we have 16 pieces of bread. Think of the two ends of the bread (the one's I like to eat) as the same. They are on opposite sides of the bread, yet they are both ends. This is how the octave works. This means that essentially, there are only 15 pieces of bread plus one duplicate of the first on the end making 16. So 16 notes in an octave technically is 15 unique notes plus one stuck on the end as a higher version of the bottom note.  So we have 16 pieces of bread here, what do we do with it? Good question, I'm going to write about my investigation on here for all y'all to read!

Why 16? Why not 19, 22, 36 or 108? Why 16? OR more importantly, WHY 12?! I picked 16 because A. It's easier cuz it doesn't have too many notes to start out with. B. It's cool, and it has some neat intervals before we get into bigger scales.  Why 12? Well long story short, we had a scale called the diatonic scale and the people wanted to make it transposable to 12 keys. Why not 13 or 18? I dunno, they just wanted to. But we can do whatever we want right!?

Let's assume a few things here about our goals.

Since music all over the world uses different methods of arranging pitch to make music. We will say we're mainly going in terms of the "western approach" meaning focusing on chords and tonal movement, perhaps tension and resolution but may'be not yet. We may focus on color first.

We want to make pretty melodies as well.

So we generally are going for a chord + melody approach.