About Scala

Scala, written by Manuel Op de Coul, is the premier tool for investigating alternative tunings. Here's what it says on the Scala homepage:

Scala is a powerful software tool for experimentation with musical tunings, such as just intonation scales, equal and historical temperaments, microtonal and macrotonal scales, and non-Western scales. It supports scale creation, editing, comparison, analysis, storage, tuning of electronic instruments, and MIDI file generation and tuning conversion. All this is integrated into a single application with a wide variety of mathematical routines and scale creation methods. Scala is ideal for the exploration of tunings and becoming familiar with the concepts involved. In addition, a very large library of scales is freely available for Scala and can be used for analysis or music creation.


Press here to go to the Scala home page in your browser. Scala works great and is free.

The TransFormSynth can be used with Scala .tun files, which define how all the 128 MIDI notes are to be tuned. You simply drag and drop a .tun tuning file onto the box that says "drop .tun file here" and the TransFormSynth will automatically be retuned in the specified way. Moreover, the appropriate timbres (defining the spectral mapping for the scale) are automatically calculated and loaded. You can then slide smoothly between the tempered and the original overtones using the timbre slider.