There are parallel musical universes that exist, with notes different from the 12 we know — and you can use them!
Parallel Musical Universes
Here’s the core idea: the 12 notes we use in virtually all Western music are not the only notes that exist. They’re just the ones that a particular historical tradition settled on. But music theory, at a deep level, is about ratios — the mathematical relationships between sound wave frequencies — and those ratios don’t care about the piano keyboard. There is an infinite landscape of possible note collections out there, each one its own little universe with its own internal logic, its own characteristic moods, and its own completely unique sonic palette.
These parallel musical universes each have their own sets of notes — different from the 12 we know — and those notes unlock sounds and feelings from your instruments and synths that are simply not accessible from within the familiar 12-note world.
Overtones and the Harmonic Series: The DNA of Sound
To understand why any of this matters, we need to talk about what makes a violin sound like a violin, and a flute sound like a flute, even when they’re playing the exact same note.
When any physical object vibrates — a string, an air column, a membrane — it doesn’t just vibrate at one frequency. It vibrates at a whole cascade of frequencies simultaneously, called the harmonic series. The lowest of these is called the fundamental, and the ones above it are called overtones or harmonics. These harmonics occur at exact integer multiples of the fundamental frequency: 2×, 3×, 4×, 5×, 6×, 7×, 8×, and so on, theoretically forever.
The relative loudness or softness of each of these harmonics — which ones are strong, which ones are weak, which ones are entirely absent — is what we call timbre. Timbre is the “vibe” or “identity” of a sound. A violin has a rich, nasal harmonic series with prominent upper partials. A clarinet suppresses even-numbered harmonics in a distinctive way. A pure sine wave has only the fundamental and nothing else, which is why it sounds so clean and almost inhuman.
This is the entire reason microtonal tuning can conjure new sonic identities from existing instruments and synths. When you retune your synth patches or sampled instruments to a different set of pitches — pitches that are in closer alignment with the upper reaches of the harmonic series — you can cause those overtones to reinforce each other in ways they never could in 12-tone tuning. The result is chords and timbres that feel richer, stranger, and more alive — sounds that seem to glow from the inside.
12edo: The Universe We Live In
The tuning system used in virtually all contemporary music is called 12edo — 12 Equal Divisions of the Octave. The octave is divided into 12 equally-spaced semitones, and all of our scales, chords, and harmony are built from those 12 steps.
12edo got as far as it did because it’s a remarkably good approximation machine for the lower harmonics in the harmonic series. Specifically, it approximates the 2nd harmonic, the 3rd harmonic, and the 5th harmonic very well — that is, the octave, the perfect fifth, and the major third. These are the building blocks of triads — the fundamental harmonic unit of virtually all Western music. When 12edo’s fifths and thirds lock into those harmonic ratios even approximately, you get chords that feel stable, resolved, and pleasing to the ear.
This is the reason 12edo works so well with most conventional instruments. Most orchestral and rock instruments generate harmonic spectra that are dominated by the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th harmonics. 12edo plays nicely with those instruments because it’s already “tuned” to their dominant overtones.
But here’s the catch: the harmonic series doesn’t stop at 5. It keeps going — to the 7th harmonic, the 11th harmonic, the 13th harmonic, and beyond. And 12edo does a terrible job of approximating the 7th and 11th harmonics. Those are entire colours of sound — entire emotional flavours — that are effectively locked away behind the walls of our familiar 12-note universe.
Breaking Into New Sound Identities: The 7- and 11-Limit
So what happens if we want to explore genuinely new types of sonic identity — sounds and feelings that no one has ever put into a video game OST before — but without just generating random noise?
The answer lies in just intonation and specifically in the concept of prime limits. A 5-limit tuning system — like 12edo — only meaningfully engages the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th harmonics. But if we extend our reach to the 7-limit and the 11-limit, we’re suddenly making use of the 7th and 11th harmonics too.
These new harmonics have completely distinct emotional characters. The 7th harmonic gives intervals a dark, bluesy, slightly compressed quality — it’s present in the natural overtones of brass instruments and gives the blues scale part of its emotional punch, but in 12edo we only ever approximate it clumsily. The 11th harmonic gives a more ambiguous, floating, almost otherworldly quality — suspended, hovering between consonance and dissonance in a way that feels genuinely alien.
Crucially, using a tuning system that approximates all prime harmonics up to 11 doesn’t mean abandoning the familiar. You still get the octave, the fifth, and the third you know and love. You’re just adding new flavours to the palette — richer colours, stranger hues. The music still sounds like music. It still resolves. It still breathes. It just does so in ways that can stop a listener dead in their tracks, because they’ve never quite heard that colour before.
And for a video game composer trying to evoke an alien civilisation, a spirit realm, a dreaming god, or a dimension outside of time? That’s pure gold.
The tuning systems that do this especially well are the ones that make good 7- and 11-limit approximations while still being manageable in terms of note count and practical usability. And as it turns out, there are three that stand out from the crowd: 22edo, 26edo, and 31edo.
22edo: The Adventurous Minimalist
22edo — 22 Equal Divisions of the Octave — is arguably the most musically radical of the three. It has only ten more notes than the 12 we’re used to, which makes it the most compact and the most physically manageable: it’s relatively straightforward to map 22edo onto retuned guitars, wind controllers, or midi keyboards without completely reinventing your instrument setup.
But 22edo’s real character comes from something deeper: it has no meantone structure. In 12edo, we’re used to a particular step pattern — tones and semitones stacking up in ways that give us major scales, minor scales, and all the chord progressions that go with them. 22edo doesn’t play that game. Its intervals don’t arrange themselves into the familiar meantone patterns, which means composers are forced to work within 22edo’s native temperament families instead.
This is both the challenge and the superpower. The native temperament families of 22edo include pajara, porcupine, and superpyth, and all three of these have 7- and 11-limit intervals baked directly into their DNA. You can’t really use 22edo in a standard Western way — and that’s a feature, not a bug, because it means you can’t accidentally write music that sounds like it could have been in 12edo. Every chord, every scale, every melodic gesture is fundamentally coloured by those new harmonic dimensions.
The tradeoffs are real, though. Because 22edo has fewer notes, its approximations of the harmonic series — while good — are not as accurate as the other two systems we’ll discuss. And because it has no meantone structure, composers who try to apply their existing music theory knowledge will quickly find that scales don’t behave the way they expect. A major scale equivalent in 22edo sounds recognisably major-ish, but also subtly, unsettlingly wrong in ways that can take time to internalise. For a video game composer, this could be exactly the alien strangeness you’re looking for — but it requires genuine investment to learn the system from the ground up.
Best for: OST composers who want a sound that is genuinely, unmistakably other — alien landscapes, fever dreams, ancient gods — and who are willing to abandon familiar theory to get there.
26edo: The Familiar Stranger
26edo — 26 Equal Divisions of the Octave — occupies a fascinating middle ground. Unlike 22edo, it does have a meantone-like structure. Western music theory can be applied to it fairly directly: scales behave in reasonably familiar ways, circle of fifths logic carries over, and a composer who already knows their way around a 12-tone system will find their footing in 26edo much more quickly than in 22edo. The universe is different, but the map is similar enough to read.
With 26 notes, it’s also still in a relatively manageable range for physical instruments. Think of how King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and artists like Angine De Poitrine have mapped 24edo onto microtonal guitars — 26edo sits in a similar zone of accessibility. You can build custom instruments, retune guitar strings, or use MPE-capable synths to access 26edo without needing a completely alien controller setup.
And because 26edo retains that familiar framework, you can have your cake and eat it too: write a chord progression that feels structurally similar to something from a Japanese RPG, but with new harmonic colours underneath it that no RPG has ever used.
That said, 26edo has a notable weakness: its perfect fifths and perfect fourths are the weakest of the three systems discussed here. They’re noticeably further from pure than in 12edo, which means chords won’t have quite the same bold, resonant quality. If you’re writing music that leans heavily on open fifths — think epic medieval fantasy, or powerful orchestral swells — you may find 26edo’s harmonic foundations feel a little uncertain underfoot.
Additionally, while 26edo’s thirds and sixths are tuned with roughly similar accuracy to those in 12edo, their error goes in the opposite direction — they’re wider where 12edo’s are narrow, and vice versa. For listeners, this might just feel subtly strange for the first few minutes. For musicians who’ve spent years internalising the precise sound of equal-tempered thirds, it can take a few hours of playing before those intervals start to feel natural and right rather than just off. Budget some adjustment time.
Best for: Composers who want to dip into new harmonic territory while retaining the ability to think and write in familiar theoretical terms — a parallel universe with familiar street signs.
31edo: The Master Key
31edo is, by many measures, the crown jewel of this trio. It’s the most accurate of the three systems in terms of how closely it approximates the full harmonic series — not just the 7th and 11th harmonics, but across the board. This accuracy is what allows 31edo to truly sing: when you play a seventh chord in 31edo, the overtones lock together in a way that makes the chord feel almost luminous. New harmonic colours don’t just appear — they bloom.
For composers who already have a background in classical music, 31edo offers something remarkable: it is essentially quarter-comma meantone extended. Quarter-comma meantone is one of the most important historical tuning systems in Western music — it was the dominant tuning of the Renaissance and early Baroque, and many classical musicians and scholars are already familiar with it. 31edo is what you get when you extend that chain of fifths far enough to wrap around into a closed system of 31 notes. If you know quarter-comma meantone, you already have a significant head start in 31edo. The familiar theory doesn’t just carry over — it deepens and expands.
31edo also has a surprisingly strong connection to Arabic maqam music. Quarter tones — the microtonal intervals central to many maqam traditions — are typically associated with 24edo, but 31edo actually approximates those quarter-tone intervals more accurately than 24edo does, opening the door to a genuinely convincing fusion of maqam aesthetics with the deeper harmonic richness of the 7- and 11-limit. For a video game composer working on a Middle Eastern fantasy setting, this could be transformative.
Notation in 31edo is also the most straightforward of the three systems — the standard note names and accidentals extend naturally, making it easier to write down your ideas and communicate with other musicians.
And then there are the scales. 31edo introduces a collection of utterly remarkable new scale structures: Orwell[9], with its strange, almost crystalline geometry; Miracle[10], one of the most celebrated scales in all of microtonal theory; and the Erose–McClain double mode family, which creates symmetrical, kaleidoscopic patterns reminiscent of the augmented, diminished, or whole-tone scales — but saturated with new 7- and 11-limit colours that make them sound like nothing else in existence. These are not mere novelties; they are fully functional, emotionally coherent scale systems that can carry an entire OST.
The primary drawback of 31edo is simple: 31 notes is a lot. For most conventional instruments, it’s genuinely impractical without specialised equipment. The gold standard solution is an isomorphic keyboard like the Lumatone, which maps all 31 notes in an intuitive, geometric layout that makes navigating the system far more manageable. Alternatively, composers can work with multiple instruments simultaneously, each tuned to a different subset of the 31-note system — a technique with a rich history in just intonation practice. Neither solution is as simple as just sitting down at a standard keyboard, and that’s a real barrier to entry.
Best for: Composers who want maximum harmonic richness and are willing to invest in the infrastructure to access it — think lush, jewel-toned fantasy worlds, divine or cosmic soundscapes, or deeply emotional character themes.
All Three, Together
Here’s the liberating truth: you don’t have to choose just one. These three tuning systems are not competing philosophies — they’re complementary tools in a toolkit, each suited to different creative moments and different sonic goals. A video game OST might use 22edo for an alien civilization’s motif, 26edo for the player character’s home world, and 31edo for the final boss’s divine true form. The boundaries between these universes are yours to draw.
The good news is that a vibrant community of composers has already been charting these territories, and you can learn from what they’ve built. For 22edo, artists like Brendan Byrnes and Sevish have created accessible, genuinely exciting music that demonstrates the system’s otherworldly power. For 26edo, Bryan Deister and Sevish (again) have explored its peculiar blend of familiarity and novelty in deeply compelling ways. For 31edo, Levi McClain and Zhea Erose have pioneered a body of work that shows just how emotionally rich and fully realised microtonal composition can be.
The Xenharmonic Wiki contains detailed information about each of these tuning systems — their mathematical properties, their scale families, their temperament structures, and real musical examples. Fair warning: it can be dense. The language is often technical, steeped in the specific vocabulary of regular temperament theory. But don’t let that intimidate you.
If the theory feels like too much, there is another way entirely: just open up Scale Workshop — a free, browser-based tool — or sit down with a Lumatone keyboard, and start playing. Dial up 22edo, 26edo, or 31edo. Load a scale. Move your fingers. Listen. You don’t need to know what a val is or how to calculate cents to know when something sounds hauntingly beautiful, or strangely peaceful, or cosmically vast. Your ears will tell you. Trust them.
Be an Explorer
The history of music is the history of people stumbling into new sonic territory and saying: wait — what was that? The blues scale, the tritone substitution, the Shepard tone, the Neapolitan chord — all of these were once strange new discoveries that seemed to break the rules, until they became the rules. The next chapter of that history is being written right now, in parallel musical universes where the notes are different and the feelings are new.
Video game music has always been at the frontier of emotional and sonic experimentation. It has no obligation to sound like anything else. It exists to serve a feeling, an image, a moment — and there are feelings, images, and moments that cannot yet be scored, because the notes for them haven’t been used yet.
22edo, 26edo, and 31edo are your maps to those notes. Go explore. Break new ground. Pave the way for the future of expressive music composition — one strange, luminous, parallel universe at a time.
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