5 composers who use microtones to build a stronger sense of place and immerse the listener
Thw twelve notes we use in Western music are a practical convention — a grid laid over a continuous, infinite spectrum of pitch. Most music stays neatly inside the lines. But a growing community of composers has been pushing beyond that grid, using intervals that sit between the keys of a piano. These are called microtones, and the composers who use them are quietly building some of the most immersive, otherworldly sound worlds in music today.
For video game composers especially, this matters. Games live and die by their ability to create a sense of place — the feeling that you have stepped into a world with its own rules, its own gravity, its own emotional logic. Microtones can do that. A single unfamiliar interval, ringing out at the right moment, can communicate “this place is ancient,” or “this city is broken,” or “something beautiful is hiding just beneath the surface” — in a way that no standard chord can quite manage.
You don’t need a music theory degree to start exploring this. You just need to listen. Here are five musicians using microtones right now, across genres that should feel familiar to any game composer, each of them doing something genuinely new with the palette.
A Quick Note on the Vocabulary
When we talk about microtonal music, we’re really talking about music that uses tuning systems other than 12-tone equal temperament — the standard system that divides an octave into twelve equal semitones. Alternative systems might divide the octave into 19, 22, 31, or any number of steps. Others use just intonation, which tunes intervals to pure mathematical ratios derived from the harmonic series. The result is that certain chords sound cleaner and more resonant than anything in standard tuning, while others sound deliciously tense and unresolved in new ways.
None of that theory is required to enjoy what follows. Just know that when something sounds strange and alive and right, that’s likely why.
1. Benyamind — New Colours in the Film Score Palette
Start here if you want to ease in gently.
Benyamind is a composer and producer whose music sits somewhere between grand film score, ambient world music, and psychedelic electronic experimentation. His 2022 album Namoic is an ideal entry point for anyone curious about microtones but cautious about the idea that they’ll make music sound jarring or unpleasant. They don’t — not here. Benyamind’s microtonal choices are subtle enough that many listeners won’t consciously notice them. What they’ll notice instead is a vague sense that this music sounds richer than it should, like light refracting through a crystal in a way that normal light doesn’t quite do.
The instrumentation leans into non-Western sources — strings, winds, and synthesizers that feel ancient and futuristic simultaneously — and the microtonal tuning choices slot naturally into that aesthetic. When a melody drifts slightly away from where a Western scale would place it, the effect is not “wrong.” It’s closer to the sensation of a memory you can’t quite pin down.
For game composers, Benyamind is a strong model for how microtones can function as texture rather than shock value. His work suggests that you can give your score a distinct voice, something genuinely unhearable-elsewhere, without pushing your audience out of their comfort zone. That’s a useful tool for any cinematic game environment — fantasy ruins, alien coastlines, meditative puzzle spaces — where you need atmosphere that feels specific without feeling aggressive.
Start with: The album Namoic, in full.
2. Sevish — Microtones on the Dance Floor
If Benyamind represents the gentle end of the spectrum, Sevish is where things get visceral.
Sevish is a Scottish composer and producer who has been one of the most prolific and technically rigorous voices in the xenharmonic music community for well over a decade. His music is fundamentally EDM — it has drops, builds, rhythmic energy, and the kind of clarity of purpose that makes rhythm game soundtracks so satisfying. What makes it unusual is that every element of the harmonic content is built on alternative tuning systems, often equal temperaments with many more steps per octave than the standard twelve.
“Droplet” is a good place to start. The track moves at pace, the synth work is immediate and physical, and the harmonic language is full of intervals that don’t exist in standard tuning. There’s a particular quality to some of the chords — a kind of resonant rightness that comes from using just or near-just intervals, overtones that lock together in a way standard equal temperament only approximates. They feel familiar and alien at the same time, like bumping into someone who looks like an old friend but isn’t.
“Desert Island Rain” takes that energy somewhere more textured and melancholic, showing Sevish’s range. Where “Droplet” is bright and propulsive, “Desert Island Rain” has a wetter, more searching quality — the microtones here contribute to a mood of pleasant disorientation, like trying to get your bearings in a place that’s almost but not quite recognizable.
For game composers, Sevish is essential listening for action scores, rhythm mechanics, or any game environment built on energy and momentum. He also demonstrates something important: that microtones are not inherently “ambient” or “meditative.” They work at 140 BPM just as well as they do in quiet atmospheric underscore.
Start with: “Droplet” and “Desert Island Rain,” then explore his back catalogue from there. Most of it is available on his website alongside detailed notes on the tuning systems used.
3. Greystar — Microtonal Warmth and the Feeling of Being Human
Some music sounds like it was performed. Greystar’s Microtonal Nights sounds like it was inhabited.
Greystar is a composer working in a gentle, introspective style that shares DNA with the kind of score you’d expect from an emotionally driven narrative game — think a quiet puzzle game where the story creeps up on you, or an adventure game with a world that feels lived-in and slightly worn at the edges. The instrumentation is warm, the tempos are unhurried, and the whole project has the quality of someone thinking out loud.
The microtonal element here does something distinct from what either Benyamind or Sevish are doing. Rather than using alternative tunings to create exotic colour or rhythmic intensity, Microtonal Nights uses them to introduce a kind of human imprecision into the harmonic language. The intonation has a slightly loose, organic quality — not out of tune in any distracting way, but in the way that a real ensemble sounds different from a MIDI mockup. There’s a breathing quality to the pitches, a sense that they are moving slightly, finding their place. It makes the music feel vulnerable in the best sense of the word.
This is a genuinely underexplored technique for game composers. So much game music is built in DAWs using sample libraries that are, by necessity, locked to twelve-tone equal temperament. Everything sits exactly on the grid. The result can be technically impressive but subtly sterile. Greystar’s work is a reminder that slight harmonic imprecision, carefully controlled through tuning choices, can restore some of the warmth and humanity that gets ironed out in polished production.
Start with: Microtonal Nights, front to back. It rewards patience.
4. Brendan Byrnes — Neon Cities and Cutting Through the Fog
Brendan Byrnes is a composer and guitarist who occupies a very particular aesthetic niche: retrofuturistic synth-pop with microtonal electric guitar, in a style that feels like it was beamed in from a 1980s science fiction film that was slightly too ambitious for its budget but absolutely nailed the atmosphere.
His albums Realism and Astral Bloom are the key works here. Both are built on a foundation of synthesizers, sequencers, and production choices that clearly love the neon-soaked textures of early electronic pop — Vangelis, early Human League, Tangerine Dream at their most accessible. But running through both records is Byrne’s microtonal guitar work, and this is where things get genuinely strange.
Byrne uses 7-limit and 11-limit just intonation, which means his tuning draws on intervals from higher up the harmonic series than most Western music ever ventures. The 7th harmonic produces an interval that’s noticeably flatter than a standard minor seventh — it has a bluesy, compressed quality that feels like pressure without release. The 11th harmonicproduces a tritone-like interval with its own character, bright and cutting, like a streetlight in rain.
Together, these intervals give Byrnes’ music a quality that’s hard to name but easy to feel. It’s the sound of a city that promises possibility but delivers complexity. It’s nostalgic but not sentimental. It sounds like something you once dreamed and can’t quite recover on waking.
For game composers working on urban environments, dystopian futures, or retrofuturistic aesthetics, Byrnes is essential. His work proves that microtones don’t require abandoning accessibility or groove. He makes music you can move to, and then you notice it’s doing something to your nervous system that standard music doesn’t do.
Start with: Realism, then Astral Bloom. Pay particular attention to the guitar tones and where they sit against the synths.
5. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard — The Wild Frontier Sound
If any band has demonstrated that microtonal music can cross over into mainstream rock consciousness, it’s King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
The Melbourne psychedelic rock band has been one of the most prolific and restlessly experimental groups in contemporary music for over a decade, releasing albums across genres at a pace that defies easy categorisation. In 2017, they released Flying Microtonal Banana — an album built almost entirely on instruments retuned to a 24-tone equal temperament system that incorporates quarter tones, pitches that sit exactly halfway between the notes of a standard piano. The album is heavy, psychedelic, guitar-driven, and genuinely accessible.
The tracks “Honey,” “Sleep Drifter,” and “Intrasport” are particularly good starting points. What’s striking about all three is the physical quality the microtones create. The quarter-tone bends and riffs have a dusty, unsettled energy — they feel like wide-open spaces where the rules are uncertain and the rewards are strange. If standard major and minor scales feel like built environments, navigated according to familiar maps, the music of Flying Microtonal Banana feels like terrain you’re crossing without a map, finding beauty in the places where the path runs out.
That’s a remarkable thing to achieve in a rock song, and it’s worth understanding how the tuning creates it. Quarter tones naturally produce intervals that sit outside Western harmonic expectation without being random or chaotic. The ear picks them up as intentional — there’s clearly a system at work — but the system is unfamiliar enough to create genuine tension, a sense of negotiating with a place on its own terms.
For game composers, King Gizzard’s microtonal work is a model for how alternative tunings can create a sense of worldin rock and guitar-driven contexts — wilderness areas, ancient ruins, environments where civilisation hasn’t quite taken hold. The music doesn’t tell you a place is dangerous or beautiful; it makes you feel the texture of being there.
Start with: “Honey,” then “Sleep Drifter,” then “Intrasport.” Then put Flying Microtonal Banana on from the beginning.
The Common Thread
What connects all five of these artists, across genres that have almost nothing else in common, is that they use microtones not as a novelty but as a compositional tool for creating place. Benyamind makes you feel the weight of an unmapped world. Sevish puts you inside a system running at full capacity. Greystar gives you the intimate warmth of a lived-in space. Brendan Byrnes lights up a city that runs on contradictions. King Gizzard shows you the frontier.
None of them are making music that says “listen to these unusual intervals.” They’re making music that uses unusual intervals to say something that standard tuning can’t quite articulate.
That’s the real lesson here for game composers. Microtones are not a gimmick and they are not exclusively the territory of theorists and academics. They are a practical, powerful, and increasingly accessible tool for building immersive sound worlds. The composers above have already mapped a great deal of the territory. The best thing you can do is start listening.
For further reading, the Xenharmonic Wiki is the most comprehensive freely available resource on alternative tuning systems, with detailed articles on every concept linked throughout this piece.
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