Whole musical languages are going extinct, and no one is doing anything about it
When a language dies, the world takes notice. Linguists race to document the last speakers. Governments fund archival projects. The BBC runs features on the final elderly custodian of some tongue with no other living speakers. There is a broadly shared understanding, across academia and the general public alike, that a language is not merely a communication tool — it is a living repository of a culture’s way of seeing the world. Each one that vanishes takes with it a unique cognitive architecture, a set of metaphors and distinctions and ways of organising reality that no other language quite captures.
But there is another kind of cultural inheritance quietly disappearing at roughly the same pace, and it receives almost none of this attention: the musical tuning systems of non-Western civilisations. Across Africa, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia, musical traditions that evolved over centuries — sometimes millennia — around specific, carefully cultivated arrangements of pitches are being flattened, sometimes within a single generation, into the uniform grid of 12-tone equal temperament. And almost nobody in linguistics or anthropology seems particularly bothered.
They should be.
What Is a Tuning System, and Why Does It Matter?
To understand what is at stake, it helps to understand what a tuning system actually is. Western music, for the past few centuries, has largely standardised on a system called 12-equal temperament (or 12-EDO: 12 Equal Divisions of the Octave). In this system, the octave is divided into exactly 12 equal steps. Each step is precisely 100 cents — a unit of measurement invented precisely to allow comparison between different tuning systems. The intervals in 12-EDO are a compromise: they approximate mathematically pure intervals from the harmonic series without actually hitting any of them exactly. The perfect fifth, for example, is 2 cents narrower than the pure 3/2 ratio it approximates. These small errors are what make it possible to play in all twelve keys without retuning an instrument — a major practical advantage for keyboards and fretted instruments.
But the harmonic series — the natural sequence of overtones that resonates within any vibrating string, column of air, or struck surface — does not divide neatly into 12 equal parts. Just intonation, the alternative approach based on tuning intervals to simple whole-number frequency ratios, produces intervals that sound acoustically pure and resonant in ways 12-EDO cannot quite replicate. A just major third (5/4, or 386 cents) is noticeably sweeter and less beating than the 12-EDO major third (400 cents). These are not tiny or academic differences. They are differences any attentive listener can hear.
The world’s non-Western musical traditions did not sit around waiting for Europe to invent equal temperament. They developed their own sophisticated responses to these same acoustic questions — and their answers are irreducibly different.
The Gamelan: A Tuning Tradition in Danger
Perhaps the most well-documented example of an endangered tuning tradition is the gamelan of Java and Bali. Gamelan orchestras — built from bronze gongs, metallophones, and drums — do not use 12-EDO. They use two ancient scale systems: pélog and sléndro.
Sléndro is roughly a five-note scale that divides the octave into five nearly (but not quite) equal parts of around 240 cents each — close to a 5-equal temperament but with deliberate, ensemble-specific deviations. Pélog is a seven-note scale with a deeply unequal structure — wide and narrow steps alternating in ways that create a sound utterly unlike any Western scale. Crucially, no two gamelan orchestras are tuned the same way. Each gamelan is a unique acoustic world. The instruments within a single ensemble are tuned to each other — not to any universal external standard — and part of the aesthetic ideal is the shimmering, beating quality (called ombak) that arises when paired instruments are tuned to be slightly and deliberately mismatched with each other.
This tradition is now under significant pressure. Indonesian pop music, largely recorded and produced using Western software and 12-EDO keyboards, dominates youth culture. Music education increasingly centres on Western instruments. And because digital audio workstations and synthesisers default to 12-EDO, young musicians who want to produce contemporary-sounding music find themselves working in a system that has no place for pélog or sléndro. The gamelan persists, and is celebrated — but it risks becoming a preserved museum artefact rather than a living, evolving tradition.
The Arabic Maqam and the Quarter-Tone
In the Arab world, the situation is similarly precarious. Arabic classical music is organised around the concept of the maqam (plural: maqamat) — a set of modal frameworks that specify not just a scale of pitches but a mood, a characteristic melodic movement, and specific ornamental conventions. What makes the maqamat musically radical from a Western perspective is that they incorporate intervals that fall between the notes of 12-EDO — most famously, the neutral third and neutral second, which sit halfway between the major and minor versions of those intervals.
The neutral third — approximately 350 cents, halfway between the 300-cent minor third and the 400-cent major third of 12-EDO — is the emotional heart of maqamat like Rast and Bayati. It is the sound that gives Arabic, Turkish, and Persian music their characteristic quality, the thing that makes them sound like themselves and nothing else. You simply cannot render Maqam Rast accurately on a standard piano. The note does not exist on the instrument.
Yet the piano is everywhere in Arab cities. Western-produced pop dominates streaming platforms. And while formal conservatories in Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad have long struggled with the tension between maqam tradition and Western theory pedagogy, the gravitational pull of 12-EDO grows stronger every year. When a producer renders a traditional melody through Auto-Tune or a MIDI keyboard, those neutral thirds quietly vanish, snapped to the nearest available semitone.
Similar patterns can be found across the region. Persian classical music uses a 17-note just intonation-derived framework, the Dastgah system, with intervals that do not map cleanly onto 12-EDO. Turkish classical music uses a 53-note theoretical system (a little like 53-EDO), which approximates just intonation very closely and gives Turkish makam its characteristic microtonal inflections. Both traditions face the same erosive pressure.
African Tuning Diversity: The Most Overlooked Case
If the gamelan and the maqam have at least received some academic attention, African tuning traditions are scandalously underrepresented in the literature. The continent is home to an extraordinary range of tuning practices, and the ethnomusicological record is patchy at best.
The mbira dzavadzimu of the Shona people of Zimbabwe — often called a “thumb piano” in casual Western description — is tuned to a system that is neither 12-EDO nor any standard just intonation framework. Researchers who have measured individual instruments find that the tuning varies not just from region to region but from instrument to instrument, with specific players and instrument-makers maintaining idiosyncratic pitch relationships that have been passed down through apprenticeship, not written theory. The pitches are not approximations of some ideal system — they are the system. When an mbira maker retunes an instrument to make it “sound more correct” by Western standards, something specific and irreplaceable is lost.
The xylophones and balafons of West and Central Africa similarly employ tuning systems that do not reduce to 12-EDO. Studies of Chopi timbila orchestras in Mozambique, for instance, have documented scale systems with intervals that approximate 7-limit just intonation — meaning they exploit overtone relationships involving the seventh harmonic, which 12-EDO largely ignores. The result is a harmonic richness that 12-EDO simply cannot produce. As cheap electronic keyboards flood rural markets — instruments that by their nature play only 12-EDO — these acoustic traditions come under pressure that is more economic than ideological, but no less corrosive.
The Indian Sruti: Ancient Theory Under Modern Pressure
Indian classical music has one of the most sophisticated and theoretically explicit pitch systems outside the Western tradition. The ancient concept of the shruti — typically counted as 22 microtonal divisions of the octave in the most influential theoretical formulations — provides the scaffolding for the vast raga system of both Hindustani (North Indian) and Carnatic (South Indian) classical music. These 22 shrutis are not equal steps; they are derived from just intonation relationships involving the first several prime harmonics, and they allow for the fine pitch distinctions that give ragas their expressive character.
The gamaka — a continuous pitch ornament that slides, oscillates, and sculpts individual notes — is inseparable from this microtonal richness. A note in a raga is not a fixed point but a zone of expression, and a musician’s mastery is partly demonstrated by their command of exactly how a note approaches, settles, and leaves its target pitch. These nuances are functionally impossible to notate in standard Western notation and are extremely difficult to capture accurately in 12-EDO MIDI sequencing.
The Carnatic tradition has, to its great credit, maintained its microtonal practices more robustly than many other traditions — in part because of strong institutional structures and a culture of intensive, long-term guru-student transmission. But Bollywood and Indian pop, produced overwhelmingly in 12-EDO, exerts enormous cultural gravity, and younger listeners increasingly experience a version of Indian music that has been quietly microtone-stripped.
Why Linguists and Anthropologists Should Care
The parallels to language loss are not superficial. Consider what is actually being lost when a tuning system disappears:
A cognitive model of pitch space. Just as different languages carve up colour space, spatial relationships, or kinship differently, different tuning systems carve up the pitch continuum differently. A musician trained in maqam hears the space between a minor third and a major third as a rich, populated territory — a place where the neutral third lives, where expression happens. A musician trained exclusively in 12-EDO hears that space as simply “out of tune.” The tuning system shapes auditory perception at a deep level. When it is lost, a way of hearing is lost with it.
A living archive of acoustic knowledge. Traditional tuning systems often encode hard-won empirical knowledge about the harmonic series and the acoustic properties of specific instruments and performance spaces. The beating patterns deliberately built into gamelan tuning, for instance, represent a sophisticated understanding of how bronze resonates in outdoor pavilions. This is knowledge that Western acoustics arrived at through different routes — but the fact that two traditions reach compatible conclusions about acoustics makes the convergence more interesting, not less.
An irreplaceable musical vocabulary. As the linguist K. David Harrison has argued about dying languages, when a language dies, we lose not just words but concepts — ways of expressing relationships and distinctions that no other language had developed. The same applies here. The specific emotional register of Maqam Hijaz does not survive translation into 12-EDO. The closest 12-EDO approximation is not Maqam Hijaz; it is a pale ghost of it. The concept, and the emotional technology it represents, is compromised in the translation.
The Recording Problem — and Its Limits
Some will argue that the solution is straightforward: record everything. And yes, recording is better than nothing. The Smithsonian Folkways collection, the work of ethnomusicologists like Simha Arom in Central Africa, and digital archives like the Global Jukebox represent invaluable work. But recordings alone are not preservation in any meaningful sense — for the same reasons that a recording of a dying language is not the same as speakers of that language being alive and using it.
A tuning tradition is not just a set of pitches. It is a practice — a set of bodily skills, social contexts, pedagogical methods, instrumental crafts, and aesthetic judgments that exist only in their living exercise. The mbira maker who knows by ear and by feel how to tune an instrument to the correct regional style cannot simply be replaced by a student who listens to a recording. The student can learn approximate pitches. They cannot, without direct transmission, learn the whole embodied knowledge system that the pitches are embedded in.
Furthermore, recordings made with standard equipment are often not precise enough to accurately capture microtonal nuances. A lot of ethnomusicological recording has used equipment and techniques optimised for intelligibility rather than pitch accuracy. Measuring the exact cent values of individual pitches in a performance requires specialised acoustic analysis, and even then, the results need to be understood in context — distinguishing intentional microtonal inflections from performance variability is a non-trivial analytical problem.
What is needed is not just recording but the kind of systematic, theoretically informed pitch documentation that organisations like the Xenharmonic Alliance have begun to develop for well-studied traditions, applied systematically to the full range of endangered tuning practices worldwide.
What Should Be Done
The field of language documentation has developed robust methodological tools over the past 40 years: community-based documentation programmes, training local speakers as linguists, creating durable digital archives with standardised metadata, and working explicitly to support language vitality rather than just extracting data before death. These methods should be applied, with appropriate modifications, to tuning documentation.
Concretely, this means:
Ethnomusicologists need to work alongside specialists in microtonal theory to develop and apply rigorous pitch measurement protocols. Measuring tuning systems requires tools — spectrum analysers, cent-accurate pitch tracking, and knowledge of how to interpret the data — that general ethnomusicologists are not always trained to use.
Funding bodies that support endangered language documentation — the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, ELDP, the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library — should explicitly add musical tuning systems to their scope. Tuning traditions are as culturally significant as lexical and grammatical structures, and the same archival urgency applies.
Music education policy in countries where indigenous tuning traditions are under pressure should be critically examined. When Indonesia, Egypt, or Nigeria standardises music education around 12-EDO keyboards, it is making a choice — often an unconsidered one — to devalue indigenous acoustic knowledge. That choice should at least be made consciously.
Digital music technology companies could do more. Software synthesisers and digital audio workstations can now support microtonal tuning through formats like Scala tuning files or MTS-ESP. Making these features more accessible to non-specialist users in affected regions would at least lower the barrier to digital production in traditional tuning systems, so that a Javanese musician who wants to produce contemporary music does not automatically have to abandon pélog to do so.
The Deeper Point
The philosopher Nelson Goodman argued that the arts are, among other things, symbol systems — ways of encoding and transmitting knowledge about the world. Musical tuning systems are not decorative add-ons to culture. They are, in Goodman’s sense, cognitive tools — systems for organising and transmitting acoustic experience that took centuries to develop and that shape the perceptual and emotional lives of the communities that use them.
We would not accept, without significant protest, a world in which the remaining speakers of Ainu or Yuchi were gradually encouraged to switch to English because English is more economically useful and globally networked. We recognise that what would be lost is more than quaint local colour — it is a form of human knowledge that the species can ill afford to throw away.
Microtonal and non-12-EDO tuning traditions deserve the same recognition. The octave can be divided in more ways than Western music ever imagined, and cultures around the world spent millennia exploring those possibilities. We are, right now, in the process of forgetting most of what they found.
That should alarm us. And it should, at the very least, alarm the people whose professional lives are devoted to understanding what human cultures know about the world.
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