He uses the microtones that other microtones are scared of
If you’ve spent a while in the corners of music YouTube or TikTok where things get genuinely strange, you may have stumbled across videos of a glowing, hexagonal keyboard being played at speed, producing music that sounds hauntingly familiar and yet somehow more — richer, more colorful, like the music you already know was only ever a sketch. The player is Bryan Deister, and that instrument is the Lumatone. What he’s doing with it is quietly one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary music.
This article is written for musicians who know their way around a key signature and a circle of fifths, but who haven’t yet gone deep into the world of microtonal music. By the end, you’ll understand what EDOs are, why the Lumatone is such a transformative instrument, and why Bryan Deister matters — not just as a performer, but as a cartographer of musical territory that has barely been explored.
First: What Is Standard Western Tuning, and What Is “Microtonal”?
Before we can talk about what Bryan does, we need to understand what he’s departing from.
The tuning system you grew up with — the one behind every piano, guitar, and synthesizer you’ve ever played — is called 12-EDO, which stands for 12 Equal Divisions of the Octave. The octave is divided into 12 equal steps (your 12 semitones: C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B), and each step is exactly 100 cents wide. This system is so universal in the West that most musicians treat it as simply “in tune.”
But it isn’t the only way to divide pitch space. There is nothing mathematically sacred about the number 12. The octave — the frequency ratio of 2:1, which sounds the same note an octave higher — can be divided into any number of equal steps. 5-EDO. 7-EDO. 19-EDO. 31-EDO. 72-EDO. Each produces a completely different palette of intervals, a different universe of chords and scales, a different emotional character.
Music that uses pitches outside the 12-EDO grid is broadly called microtonal music (or xenharmonic music — the two terms are often used interchangeably). The community exploring these alternative tuning systems calls itself the xenharmonic community, and it is small, passionate, and increasingly active.
The EDO Framework: A New Kind of Music Theory
For a musician who already understands scales, modes, and chord theory, the EDO framework is surprisingly accessible once you let go of one assumption: the assumption that a semitone is the smallest meaningful interval.
In 12-EDO, an octave contains 12 equal steps of 100 cents each. In 19-EDO, there are 19 equal steps of approximately 63 cents each. In 31-EDO, there are 31 steps of about 39 cents. In 72-EDO, there are 72 steps of just 17 cents each.
Some EDOs sound relatively close to what you already know. 19-EDO, for example, has excellent approximations of the perfect fifth and a beautifully pure minor third — it was actually proposed by music theorists as far back as the 16th century. 31-EDO has been beloved by theorists for centuries for its near-perfect major thirds and its wealth of new harmonic colors.
Others are far wilder. 13-EDO has no recognizable fifth. 11-EDO sounds alien and arhythmic to untrained ears. And then there are the very large EDOs — 72, 87, 96 — that carve the octave into such fine slices that they can approximate just intonation (the system of pure frequency ratios derived from the harmonic series) with extraordinary precision.
Each EDO is its own world. Each has its own characteristic consonances and dissonances, its own scale structures, its own emotional vocabulary. Most of these worlds have had very few visitors.
Enter Bryan Deister
Bryan Deister is a xenharmonic composer and musician who began releasing music in 2015. He has composed music for the Lumatone and has recorded improvisations in every single EDO from 5 up to 100. Xenharmonic Wiki
Read that again. Every single EDO from 5 to 100. That is 96 distinct tuning systems, each with its own internal logic, each demanding that the musician re-orient their ears and hands from scratch. For most of those tunings, Deister’s recordings represent some of the first serious musical exploration by anyone, anywhere.
Deister is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and jazz pianist. He has also written multiple albums featuring microtonal music in various tuning systems, generally equal divisions. Libsyn His background in jazz is not incidental — jazz musicians are trained to hear and navigate complex harmonic structures, and that ear for nuance and improvisation is exactly what you need when stepping into a tuning system that has no established repertoire, no theory textbooks, no established idiom. You have to feel your way.
Deister went viral on TikTok for playing microtonal versions of well-known songs on the Lumatone. Positionen His covers — ranging from video game music to pop songs to classical pieces — serve a brilliant pedagogical function: by hearing a melody you already know rendered in an unfamiliar tuning, you can focus on what the tuning is doing to the music, what colors it adds, what it reveals or conceals. It’s a perfect on-ramp.
Deister is an Arizona-based musician known for playing the Lumatone and specializing in microtonal music. elasticStageHis Patreon, his Bandcamp, his YouTube channel, and his TikTok together form one of the most comprehensive records of EDO-by-EDO exploration in existence.
The Instrument: What Is the Lumatone?
To understand why the Lumatone is so important to this story, you need to understand the problem it solves.
The standard piano keyboard is a terrible interface for microtonal music. It was designed around 12-EDO, with 7 white keys and 5 black keys per octave. Once you move beyond 12 notes per octave, the layout breaks down. A 19-EDO scale needs 19 keys per octave; a 31-EDO scale needs 31. You can work around this with software retuning, but the physical layout — the spatial memory of where notes are — becomes incoherent. Every key change, every scale, every EDO requires a completely different mental map.
The Lumatone solves this with a concept called an isomorphic layout. Instead of the asymmetrical piano layout, the Lumatone uses a grid of hexagonal keys arranged in a pattern where the relationship between any two notes stays the same regardless of where you are on the keyboard. A perfect fifth is always the same hand movement, no matter what note you start on, no matter what tuning you’re in.
The Lumatone boasts 280 illuminated, velocity-sensitive hexagonal keys, each with polyphonic aftertouch, continuous controllers, and Lumatouch expression mode. Each key can be individually programmed for expression mode, MIDI note number and channel, and key colour. It can be mapped with colorized isomorphic layouts, microtonal tunings, or harmonic tables. Lumatone Inc
The colorization is not decorative — it is functional. In a 31-EDO layout, for example, you might color all the notes of the C major scale one color, the chromatic alterations another, and the entirely new notes unique to 31-EDO a third color. The Lumatone’s hexagonal key design is based on designs by Siemen Terpstra, who developed it from the tradition of generalized keyboards pioneered by Robert Bosanquet in the 1870s and further developed by Erv Wilson from the 1960s onwards. Wikipedia
An isomorphic keyboard is a musical input device consisting of a two-dimensional grid of note-controlling elements on which any given sequence or combination of musical intervals has the same shape on the keyboard wherever it occurs — within a key, across keys, across octaves, and across tunings. Wikipedia This is the key insight: learn a chord shape once, and it works everywhere, in any key, in any compatible tuning. For a musician working across dozens of EDOs, this is transformative.
The page on the Xenharmonic Wiki describes the Lumatone as an isomorphic keyboard. Its direct predecessor was the Terpstra Keyboard, named after the designer whose hexagonal layout formed its foundation.
The Albums: A Discography Built From Unexplored Terrain
Looking at Deister’s Bandcamp page gives a sense of the scope of his output. His albums include Orpheum (released January 2026), Prelude to Exhale, Supernova, In Your Hands, Clover and Ice, The Dying Savior, Getting Out (a collaboration), and Spines of the Heart.
His most recent fully microtonal album at the time of the podcast Now and Xen was In Your Hands, which contains tracks written in a variety of tuning systems. The description on the Bandcamp page for Orpheum notes that it is his “second fully microtonal album,” one where he “wanted to get more into acoustic sounds, which required learning many new instruments and new techniques for recording.”
One track from In Your Hands listed on the Now and Xen podcast page is labeled as being in 5-ED(5/4) — which is not even a standard EDO at all, but a scale built by dividing the interval of a major third (the frequency ratio 5:4) into five equal parts rather than dividing the octave. This kind of tuning, called an ED interval, produces a non-octave scale — meaning the octave itself is not a feature of the system. It represents a level of harmonic adventurousness that goes well beyond even most microtonal composers.
His music spans jazz, alternative rock, ambient, classical, and beyond. The genre label he uses on Bandcamp for Orpheumis “alternative microtonal rock” — which is perhaps as good a description as any for music that doesn’t fit existing categories because those categories didn’t exist until someone made the music.
The Pioneer’s Role: Mapping Unmapped Tunings
Here is what makes Deister’s project genuinely historic: for a large number of the EDOs he has explored, he is among the first musicians in recorded history to seriously compose or improvise in that system.
Consider what that means in practice. When you sit down to write in C major, you have centuries of music theory to draw on. You know what a tonic feels like, what a dominant seventh does, how a deceptive cadence works. You have the entire Western tradition behind you. When Deister sits down to improvise in, say, 47-EDO or 61-EDO, there is no tradition. There is no textbook. There are no predecessors to study. He has to discover, through playing, what the consonances are, what the scales want to do, what emotional qualities the tuning possesses.
This is frontier work. The xenharmonic community does have theoretical frameworks — the Xenharmonic Wiki catalogues properties of hundreds of EDOs, and researchers have mapped which just intervals each EDO approximates well — but theory is not music. Someone has to actually play it, record it, share it, and demonstrate what it sounds like as music rather than as mathematics.
The Now and Xen podcast episode featuring Deister covers topics including Lumatone layouts and pseudo-octave tropes, translating between different tunings (which the community calls “transfer”), and paucitonality. Libsyn These are not beginner conversations — they are the working vocabulary of someone who has spent years inside these systems.
The concept of paucitonality — working with very few distinct note classes within a tuning — is one of many theoretical frameworks that only makes sense in the context of EDO music. Deister moves fluently through these ideas not as an academic exercise but as a practicing composer.
The Viral Bridge-Builder
One of the most striking things about Bryan Deister is how deliberately accessible he makes his work. Rather than restricting himself to an academic or new-music audience, he has embraced TikTok and YouTube as platforms for outreach, playing microtonal covers of songs from video games, anime, pop music, and folk traditions.
He has amassed over 213,000 TikTok followers and 8 million likes TikTok — numbers that suggest he has reached people far outside the xenharmonic community. For many of his viewers, a Bryan Deister TikTok is their first encounter with the idea that the piano keyboard is not the only way to organize pitch.
This matters enormously. Microtonal music has historically struggled to find audiences because it demands that listeners retrain their ears — and that is hard to do without a compelling reason to try. Deister’s covers give listeners exactly that reason: here is a song you love, and here is what it reveals when played in a system that offers more harmonic colors than the one it was written in.
Why This Matters for Musicians
If you’re a working musician reading this and thinking “this seems fascinating but very niche,” consider a few things.
First, many of the most celebrated moments in Western music history came from composers expanding the harmonic palette of their time. The shift from modal to tonal music. The expansion of chromaticism in the Romantic era. The development of jazz harmony. Microtonality is the next expansion — not a replacement for what came before, but an addition.
Second, several EDOs that Deister explores are not as alien as they might sound. 19-EDO, for example, contains a recognizable major scale, a recognizable minor scale, and a perfect fifth that is only slightly narrower than the one you already know. It also offers new intervals — a septimal minor seventh, a near-pure major third — that enrich the harmonic palette considerably. Players who already know standard theory find it surprisingly accessible.
Third, the Lumatone’s isomorphic layout means that much of what you already know — scale and chord shapes — transfers directly. You don’t start from zero. You start from what you already understand, and you discover what else is possible.
Where to Start
If you want to encounter Deister’s work, here are the best entry points:
His Bandcamp page (bryandeister.bandcamp.com) has his full discography, and albums are inexpensive. Orpheum(2026) and In Your Hands (2022) are excellent starting points for fully microtonal work.
His YouTube channel (Bryan Deister) has hundreds of videos, including both original compositions and microtonal covers, with visualizations of the Lumatone that let you watch the instrument in action.
His TikTok (@bryandeister) has the most accessible short-form content, with covers of recognizable songs that serve as a perfect introduction.
His Patreon (at AU$29.74/month) supports ongoing work and includes access to exclusive posts.
For the theoretical side, the Xenharmonic Wiki is the definitive reference for EDO theory, with dedicated pages for every tuning system Deister explores.
And for a longer conversation about Deister’s ideas in his own words, the Now and Xen podcast episode 069 is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand how a working microtonal composer thinks.
Coda
There is a long tradition in music of artists who spend their careers mapping territory that others will later settle. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier partly to demonstrate what equal temperament could do — a tuning system that was, at the time, controversial and unfamiliar. Coltrane’s late recordings opened harmonic doors that other jazz musicians are still walking through.
Bryan Deister is doing something analogous. He is not writing music for a large audience that already understands these tunings, because that audience doesn’t exist yet. He is writing the music that creates the audience — demonstrating, EDO by EDO, that these are not abstract theoretical constructs but living sonic worlds with real emotional power.
The musicians who will write the definitive works in 23-EDO, or 37-EDO, or 61-EDO, may not have been born yet. But when they arrive, they will find that someone already walked the territory, recorded what they heard, and left the maps behind.
That someone is Bryan Deister.
Comments
Post a Comment