Links to Some Internet Resources on Tuning and Temperaments

There is a lot of material available; this is just a selection of some things I've come across.
For more information, see the excellent tuning and temperament bibliography and links from the Huyghens-Fokker Foundation.

General Information on Historical Tunings

Tunings for J. S. Bach

Just and Alternative Tunings

Understanding Temperaments is a general introduction, with audio examples and a Java applet which lets you experiment with different tunings.

Kyle Gann's An Introduction to Historical Tunings, written by a composer working with alternative tunings.

Claudio di Veroli's Unequal Temperaments Site

Audio examples of different tunings, from the Huygens-Fokker Foundation and from Wim Kamp.

Pythagorean Tuning... is a long and excellent article on the history of tunings, particularly in the middle ages.

A spreadsheet for calculating temperaments.

Zarlino, a site (in French) about just intonation in Renaissance vocal music, with many audio examples.

Music translated into Mathematics: Leonhard Euler

Articles on tuning and temperament in Wikipedia.

A list of links related to tuning for Bach.

Andreas Sparschuh's page on his 1998/9 interpretation of the  "Bach squiggle". See also the  bach-tunings discussion group.

Bradley Lehmann's pages  on his interpretation of  the Bach squiggle.

Kenneth Mobb's note  on squiggle  temperaments.

Charles Francis's page on Bach-squiggle-related tunings; shows many other squiggles.

Tunings derived from BWV 924

Chapter 2 of David Ledbetter's book Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Yale Univ. Press 2002) discusses the development of ideas on tuning in Germany over Bach's lifetime.

Just Intonation Network is the home page of an organisation dedicated to just tunings and alternative scales. There is a lot of information here.

William Sethares' pages, with  material on alternative tunings, and tunings tailored to the harmonic structure (timbre) of the sound.

Scala:  free and powerful software for experimenting and working with tunings and temperaments.


Maintained by d.griffel@bris.ac.uk