Appendix 1: About the Author

Name:

Erik Zuurbier

Education:

Bachelor Electronics

Profession:

Information Analyst

Music:

Self-taught electronic organ and button accordion. Couple of years of (pipe) organ classes (Hans Brüggen OSB) and singing classes (Gerda van Zelm). I used to sing in choirs. I used to regularly play the Maarschalkerweerd organ in services in the Roman Catholic church of Joppe near Zutphen in The Netherlands. All on an amateur level. In 2016 I published about the core of the software in the Dutch magazine 'Het Orgel' (Bach in just intonation).

Contact:

Your feedback will be much appreciated. The e-mail address is:

Why this site?

I have been reading about just intonation for many years and invented the manual keyboard somewhere around 1980. Much later I realized that if I had a working keyboard, I would not know which keys to press to make it sound good: with the multitude of pitches available in just intonation it is much easier to play way out of tune. I soon found out that manually annotating a score for just intonation was not only laborious, it was also very frustrating because it involved a lot of backtracking after finding out that an earlier choice turned out wrong many measures later. What added to the frustration is that the end result was never ideal. So that process had to be automated. It was then up to me, the listener, to just sit back and decide whether the end result was good enough. It was often a pleasure to improve the optimization algorithm, until it was good enough (IMHO), although I must admit there have been moments I was ready to give up, when I faced problems that seemed insurmountable.

Meanwhile, what I found on the internet was mostly limited to number theory. Most of the few sound files I found were limited to single chords; hardly any complete works. Not much web content seems to be based on the author having actually heard music in just intonation. This website seeks to fill that gap and to substantiate the idea that just intonation is practicable.

My own experience is that it takes some time to get used to just intonation. Particularly a melodic rising major third sounded way too narrow to me in the beginning, but not anymore. Furthermore, I found that syntonic commas may sound all right if they occur in the middle voices of a progression.

If it all works out well, I would be very pleased to once see and hear somebody play an instrument based on the ideas here outlined. Indeed, the prototype keyboard is just that - no sound yet. Maybe one way or another, the means and the expertise to build a real instrument could be brought together.

Hence this website.

The author built a prototype keyboard around 1990 (photograph Jorine Janssen).

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