I just learned about Ratioscore

For a while now, I’ve wanted to use my programming skills and my knowledge of just intonation to build a useful tool for those interested in learning or writing in just intonation. My ideas include:

• a JI piano roll, where clicking on a note shows you its relation to every other note
• a matching game where you learn to construct rational intervals with a drag & drop interface
• a programming language for notating just intonation scores, which could then generate sheet music or audio/MIDI

Until a few days ago, I was unaware of any tools that did these things. But I happened upon Ratioscore, and it does a lot of the same things I wanted to do with the programming language idea.

I’ve wanted to get more into just intonation before, but I had limited tools, and I found it prohibitively difficult to produce JI audio. With something like Ratioscore in my toolkit, I’ll be able to learn & experiment more, and practice writing my own music in just intonation.

Ratioscore will be useful for now, but I still haven’t given up on making my own just intonation tools. I think with the right interface, JI could be made a lot more intuitive to the uninitiated. I might even still try to make my own version of a JI language, because I’d like some fancier features than what Ratioscore offers.

Here’s a passage from gomepage anthem Orchard Glen I produced in Ratioscore. It’s mostly 5-limit, with just a little bit of 7 thrown in on one chord. I felt like doing it brushed off my old skills and taught me some new things, and I’m looking forward to doing more.

Have you used Ratioscore? Do you know of other useful just intonation tools? What do you think of the JI version of Orchard Glen? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.