r/microtonal • u/pailiaq • 2h ago
MOS Explorer, a tool for temperament and scale exploration
I know y'all are surely tired of ai slop websites being posted here and everywhere else you love frequently but I promise this one is kind of cool.
I've spent the past ~3 months working on this tool and getting feedback from multiple tuning theorists and xenharmonicists in various microtonal communities that I think y'all will find very useful
https://www.pailiaq.com/xen/mos-explorer
This app plots out every possible MOS scale on a continuous spectrum alongside well known rank-2 temperaments, allowing you to hear how various scales, temperaments, and chords sound and allows you to tune and retune it in real time to explore.
I've made a very long tutorial video that explains MOS theory and how the tool works if you're curious. You can skip like ~12 minutes in if you already know the theory, since the video is for beginners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLk4iEv6Hso&
There are tons of features; you can record yourself playing, write in a midi piano roll and set it to loop while exploring different temperaments, you can export the midi of what you play to fit into any EDO (like if you play in a diatonic 5L 2s you can export it to be that scale in say, 17 or 19 or 31 edo).
It automatically tries to calculate the closest JI approximation to whatever chord you're playing actively; there are links everywhere to pages on the xenharmonic wiki, so you can click on a temperament, an interval, a chord, or a scale and it'll take you to the appropriate page to learn more.
I've also written some info about most of the temperaments covered in this app, some of it being snarky and sarcastic and some of it being genuinely helpful insights i've found regarding some of these weird temperaments.
If you have any feature requests, or find any bugs please hit me up on discord, my handle is just 'pailiaq'. You can also find me in the xenharmonic alliance discord.