The Xenharmonic Wiki is the internet’s largest encyclopedia of microtonal music theory — a year of traffic data reveals exactly what draws curious musicians in — and what keeps them coming back
The Xenharmonic Wiki is a sprawling, community-built encyclopedia dedicated entirely to microtonal and alternative tuning systems. It’s the Wikipedia of the microtonal world — dense, obsessive, but surprisingly welcoming to newcomers.
A year’s worth of Google Analytics data (April 2024 to April 2025) covering over 150,000 page views paints us a colorful picture of how musicians actually use this resource.
First, a quick primer: what is microtonal music?
Standard Western music uses 12 equal divisions of the octave — the system behind every piano, guitar, and DAW you’ve ever used. Microtonal music is the broad term for music that uses intervals outside or between those 12 notes. That might mean using 19 notes per octave, or 31, or 53, or tuning based on pure mathematical ratios rather than equal divisions at all.
It’s not fringe. Microtonal ideas appear in Indian classical music, Middle Eastern maqam traditions, blues and jazz intonation, and increasingly in Western experimental and electronic music. The theory, though, can be daunting — which is exactly why the Xenharmonic Wiki exists.
The front door: software before theory
The single most-visited content page on the Xenharmonic Wiki — with nearly 11,000 views from over 7,000 unique visitors — is the List of microtonal software plugins. Not a theory page. Not a history page. A list of tools.
Most people arriving at the Xenharmonic Wiki aren’t pure theorists. They’re producers and composers who have heard something that doesn’t sound quite like standard tuning and want to make that sound. The first question isn’t “what is 31edo?” — it’s “what do I need to download?”
The List of music software (4,300 views) and the DAWs page (over 1,000 views) reinforce this. The practical, hands-on pages pull in the biggest audiences. Theory comes second — but once people are in, they go deep.
The EDO obsession
After software, the data is absolutely dominated by equal-step tuning systems — specifically, pages about different EDOs(Equal Divisions of the Octave). The idea is simple: instead of dividing the octave into 12 equal steps, what if you used a different number?
The wiki has individual pages for dozens of EDOs, and the traffic rankings are a window into which ones the microtonal community has decided are most worth exploring:
31edo is the undisputed champion with nearly 15,000 views — more than any other single tuning system page, and more than twice the views of 12edo. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s spent time in microtonal circles. 31 equal divisions gives you beautiful approximations of just intonation intervals, a usable version of meantone temperament, and enough notes to explore harmonic territory that 12edo can’t reach — without being so complex that it’s impractical. Many microtonal composers consider it the most musically rewarding entry point.
19edo comes in second among EDOs with over 7,000 views. It preserves familiar interval relationships in a slightly altered form — major and minor thirds that are subtly different from 12edo — and is often recommended as the most approachable first step away from standard tuning.
12edo itself gets 6,100 views, which is interesting. People are looking up the tuning system they already use — presumably to understand it in the context of alternatives, or to see how it compares mathematically to other systems.
Other well-trafficked EDOs include 53edo (5,900 views), long celebrated by theorists for its extraordinary approximation of just intervals; 41edo and 22edo (around 5,800 and 5,700 views each); and 24edo (5,200 views) — quarter-tone tuning, probably the most familiar microtonal system to classically-trained musicians.
The general EDO article itself pulls in 8,200 views, suggesting many people start there and then branch out to specific systems.
The pages people really read
Raw view counts tell one story. Engagement time tells another. Some pages in the data show average engagement times of two to three minutes — which, for a theory-heavy wiki, means people are sitting down and genuinely studying.
The Gallery of just intervals, with 6,200 views and an average engagement time of over 157 seconds, is clearly functioning as a reference page that musicians return to repeatedly. Just intonation — tuning based on pure mathematical ratios rather than equal divisions — is one of the foundational concepts in microtonal theory, and this gallery is evidently a go-to lookup resource.
The Riemann zeta function and tuning is one of the more surprising entries in the top 20, with nearly 5,000 views. It’s a genuinely advanced mathematical topic — connecting a famous function from number theory to the question of which equal temperaments best approximate just intervals. The fact that it gets this much traffic suggests the wiki’s audience skews toward the mathematically curious.
The Meantone family page stands out for engagement: 3,456 views with an average session of over 228 seconds — nearly four minutes. Meantone temperament is the historical tuning system used in Western music before equal temperament became standard, and understanding it is a key bridge between music history and microtonal theory. Clearly, people aren’t just skimming this one.
Similarly, 5L 2s — the abstract scale pattern that underlies the familiar major and minor scales — gets 3,257 views with high engagement. This is part of the wiki’s coverage of MOS scales (Moment of Symmetry scales), a theoretical framework for understanding scale structure that applies across all tuning systems.
The interval pages: a quiet favourite
Scattered through the data are dozens of pages dedicated to individual musical intervals expressed as frequency ratios: 3/2(the perfect fifth), 5/4 (the pure major third), 7/4 (the harmonic seventh), 81/80 (the syntonic comma), and many more.
These pages collectively account for a significant chunk of total traffic. They’re being used as a reference library — musicians working out the mathematics of a tuning system, checking what a particular ratio sounds like, or understanding why a specific interval is important. The Gallery of just intervals page is the hub, but the individual ratio pages are where people end up when they need the details.
Temperament theory: the deep end
Beyond EDOs and intervals, the wiki covers a rich landscape of regular temperament theory — mathematical frameworks for describing how different tuning systems relate to each other and to just intonation. These pages attract a smaller but highly engaged audience.
Orwell temperament (2,567 views), Magic temperament (1,299 views), Porcupine (1,704 views), and the Schismatic family (1,745 views) all appear in the data with solid engagement times. These are abstract systems that don’t map neatly onto any familiar tuning — they’re for people who have already gone well past “what is microtonality?” and are now exploring its theoretical frontier.
Harmonic entropy (2,177 views) is another deep-theory page that punches above its weight. It’s a psychoacoustic concept — a mathematical model of how consonant or dissonant a given interval sounds to human ears — and it’s foundational to understanding why some microtonal intervals work musically and others don’t.
What the data tells us about the community
A few patterns emerge from all of this that paint a picture of who uses the Xenharmonic Wiki and why.
The community is practically oriented first, theoretically curious second. Software pages dominate the top of the traffic charts. But the theory pages that get the most engagement are ones with immediate practical application — scale structures, interval references, specific tuning systems you can actually use.
31edo has won the popularity contest, for now. Its traffic lead over every other EDO is substantial. Among musicians actively exploring microtonality, 31 equal divisions has become something like a consensus recommendation — good enough to be deeply expressive, manageable enough to actually use.
The mathematical depth of the wiki is a feature, not a bug. Pages like the Riemann zeta function piece, harmonic entropy, and the temperament family articles get real traffic. The audience isn’t just musicians who want to sound a bit different — it includes people who want to understand the deep structure of pitch and harmony from first principles.
People keep coming back. The high views-per-user ratios on many pages (some EDO pages average nearly 3–4 visits per user) suggest this isn’t drive-by traffic. Microtonal theory is complex enough that people return to the same reference pages repeatedly as their understanding deepens.
Where to start if this has piqued your curiosity
If you’re a musician with solid theory knowledge who’s never explored microtonality, the Xenharmonic Wiki can be overwhelming to navigate cold. Here’s a suggested path in:
The General theory page is the best first stop — a broad map of the conceptual landscape that gives you the vocabulary to navigate everything else. From there, Xen concepts for beginners translates the core ideas into approachable terms for musicians coming from a standard Western theory background. When you’re ready to survey the full breadth of what’s possible, the List of approaches to musical tuning lays out just how many different directions the field has gone — equal temperaments, just intonation, historical systems, spectral tuning, and much more.
The rabbit hole is real. 150,000 people a year are already down it — and the data suggests they’re having a great time.
The Xenharmonic Wiki is a free, community-maintained resource at en.xen.wiki. All traffic data referenced in this article covers the period April 2024 to April 2025.
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