Imanuel's website

Description

These "just" scales are based on equal temperament. All intervals are aimed to be within a schisma (32805/32768, ~1.95 cents) of the approximated interval from equal temperament.

I wrote a program that evaluates fractional approximations to the intervals by repeatedly incrementing the numerator of the fraction. The denominator is increased accordingly. These approximations are assigned a "distance" (or, inverse score) by dividing the larger of the two intervals (either the approximated equal temperament interval, or the approximation itself) by the smaller one. The program for a specific interval will stop when a sufficiently good approximation is found (I chose a distance below a schisma to be "sufficiently good").

One other factor however is also introduced, which often times makes these distances larger than that schisma in the end: the interval encompassing both the harmonics and the subharmonics (the product of the numerator and denominator) should be smaller than 8 octaves (2^8 = 256).

For getting the prime-limit scales, I could simply skip the approximations where either the numerator or the denominator had prime factors above the designated value. For example a 19-limit by definition has no prime factors above 19 in the numerator or denominator.

Try it now / Get Scala file

Scala file contents

! Imanuel's JI 3.scl
!
A new 19-limit just tuning, more info at http://imanuelhab.mooo.com/functional-web-language/fwd-to-html.php?q=the_strangest_scales%2Fnew-19-limit-just-tuning-imanuel.fwd&lang=en
 12
!
 17/16
 9/8
 19/16
 24/19
 4/3
 17/12
 3/2
 19/12
 27/16
 16/9
 17/9
 2/1

Prime factors and frequencies

Other tunings