Why is microtonal music still obscure?

>barbershop music is not microtonal
The harmonic seventh is the defining feature of barbershop. If you don't include harmonic sevenths it's just vocal quartet. The harmonic seventh is unambiguously microtonal.

24TET which sounds bad and an emphasis on harmony instead of melody which is what microtonal music is mainly about.
Western microtonal music doesn't have much to do with original microtonal musical traditions and thus doesn't use any of the theory behind those traditions. Its innovative but just sounds gimmicky to my ears

> The harmonic seventh is unambiguously microtonal.
Again, that is irrelevant. Just because barbershop uses a microtonal interval doesn’t make barbershop as a genre “microtonal music”. Whatever point you’re trying to argue here is entirely moot.

Because Europeans objectively perfected musical intervals with the 12 notes
Microtonal sounds like shit kys

And Just to add, blues music uses an overtonal seventh that doesn’t fit the chromatic scale- does that mean blues music is microtonal music too?

>objectively perfected musical intervals with the 12 notes
If that was the case, then the intervallic ratios wouldn’t be so god-damned messy.

>24TET
Yes, it doesn't help that the most obvious microtonal tuning is so bad. 24EDO does nothing to fix the bad 5-limit harmony of 12EDO (the out of tune thirds known to every guitarist who tunes by ear), and little to improve 7-limit. The major improvement is in 11-limit, but without a supporting context of simpler harmonies 11-limit just sounds weird.

Among 12EDO compatible tunings, 36EDO is better, and 72EDO better still. 24EDO is a lot of complexity for very little gain.

>does that mean blues music is microtonal music too?
Intent matters. Blue notes are not usually thought of as higher-limit harmony like barbershop sevenths are. They're more an expressive technique like vibrato.

This is really good thanks

look into Colundi. Aleksi Perala releases like an album a week of techno or ambient with that tuning scale and a lot of it is quite good and unique listening.

>There are so many oversaturated avenues for experimental artists, but this is not one of them.
>It still feels like a gimmick with no killer composition.

It's been used plenty, it's just less obvious than other compositional techniques. You just have to have a very good ear to notice a lot of the time.

And also they're right
It does sound bad a lot

Definitions matter too, which is why arguing that barbershop is microtonal music means you’re playing incredibly fast and loose with your definitions. Is microtonal music simply any piece of music that has at least one microtone?

>objectively perfected
Unfortunately, 1.5^a=2^b has no integer solutions. The history of Western music theory is a history of our attempts to grapple with this inconvenient fact. Every tuning system is imperfect. 12EDO is a pretty good compromise, especially for live performance on physical instruments, but that's not so important now. We can do better.

>a lot of world music traditions that use it use pretty simple harmony.
but that misses out on all the neat things that you can do, like really spicy diminished chords that sound totally consonant

>Is microtonal music simply any piece of music that has at least one microtone?
When it's an essential part of the genre that can't be reasonably approximated in 12EDO, yes.

I agree that 24 equal mostly sucks (except for the 350 cent neutral third and 550 cent 11/8). But most people aren't using it. And no one owes anything to tradition. Not doing something traditional doesn't mean it's gimmicky.

>Because the academic composers got into it early and made people associate the genre with Trout-Mask-Replica-tier unlistenable garbage.
you should open your mind a little more