Modern Polychromatic Music Instrument Options

An interesting video that demos some of the modern instruments that operate on the microtonal level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRUm_CoW-I

I've got a real hankering for a Haken.

Thanks for that Rich!  

Fascinating the limitations of the Seaboard that she points out, both from a pitch and a player perspective.  I agree with her that the pattern should probably be something other than a traditional keyboard layout.  Interesting to see her play it.

The Haken looks like an eye-ear-hand bear to play in any significant polyphonic way.  It needs some kind of tactile positional feedback IMO (this coming from someone who has only seen them in videos).

I'm never really sure how to take people who say they need polychromatic musical instruments.  Other than glides, pitch bend, vibrato, etc. I personally don't feel any urgent need beyond the 12 note octave as the possibilities haven't been completely mined out yet.  12 notes per octave are difficult enough to play on even specialized instruments, so I'm not all that eager for their whims to take over the world.

And, not to intentionally step on any toes or insult the person who so graciously posted this video, the need for an ultrasonic range with musical performance is pretty much horseshit.  No one can hear it, and the conventional signal chain can't support it, so in this instance more is less.

The real question is: Is there some physical reason why our ears prefer a limited pitch set? Obviously there's a ton of ethnic music out there that treats and hears pitches on a much more microtonal level than those raised on a steady diet of western (i.e. tonal) music.

Or is it all simply exposure. Could we really get used to hearing music on a true microtonal level if we had the proper instruments. The theremin is really not such a good instrument here as it's impossible to create repeatable microtonal pitch sets like you can easily do with the instrument with all the buttons (which I don't think is made anymore - though you can buy a kit). 

The theremin is an instrument that lives in a continuous pitch space, but everyone spends their lives practicing their guts out trying to turn it into a pitched instrument. When you think about it, it's actually pretty funny. 

"The real question is: Is there some physical reason why our ears prefer a limited pitch set?"  -- rkram53

Our ears like to hear simple ratios.  I imagine this is because chords composed of notes separated by simple ratios give rise to simple ratio beat notes.  The logarithmic division of 12 equal steps per octave is an unexpected and fairly amazing thing in terms of producing very close approximations of simple ratios:

http://contentspiano.blogspot.com/2006/02/mathematics-of-chromatic-scale-and.html

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/12.html

That equal temperament works as well as it does is a minor miracle - but some seem to see it as a horse with bad teeth.  16bit / 44.1kHz playback is another gift that people tend to treat like a poor stepchild, but it enabled digital audio back in the stone age and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it even today.

IMHO it's not like reality, mathematics, and psycho-acoustics are exactly handing us lemons here. 

(Sorry all, I'm petting peeves and probably straying too far from the subject.)