Re: Microtone and microtonality

I might remind everyone that the late Ivor Darreg invented the term
"xenharmonic" to denote music that doesn't sound like music in 12-tone
ET. He too was concerned about the connotations of microtone, not only
for music in scales such as 5,7,8,9,10, and 11-TET's, but also for
systems such as 13, 14 ... where the step interval doesn't sound that
much different to that of 12-tet.

From xenharmonic, one can derive xenharmonist and xenharmony. BTW, Ivor
subtitled his Xenharmonic Bulletins "xenharmonia" in Greek followed by
Greek numerals for each issue.

He proposed "metachromatic" for roughly 1/3 tone systems (Perrett used
"tierce-tone" and Fokker "tritotone," AKAIK). Metachromatic has another
meaning in histology and molecular biology, but I doubt there would be
much confusion in practice. He also used "macrotonal" for systems with
less than 12 tones, but one might argue that, strictly speaking, this
should apply only to 5-tet and below.

Frankly, I use microtonal when speaking generally to non-microtonalists
as xenharmonic and the other terms would be incomprehensible.

--John