How can anyone remember 53 notes? They don’t — that’s the trick!
So you’ve started poking around in the world of microtonal music. Maybe you watched a YouTube video, stumbled onto a Reddit thread, or heard a piece of music that sounded somehow richer or stranger than anything you’d heard before. You followed the trail and now you’re reading about things like “41edo” or “53edo” — tuning systems with 41 or 53 notes per octave — and your first reaction is something like:
“41 notes? I can barely keep track of 12.”
That reaction is completely normal. But I want to make the case that large equal divisions of the octave (large EDOs) are not actually harder to use than small ones. You just need to reframe how you think about them.
First, a quick primer: what even is an EDO?
EDO stands for Equal Division of the Octave. It’s a tuning system where you take the octave and slice it into some number of equal pieces. Standard Western music uses 12edo — 12 equal slices, which gives you the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Every piano, guitar, and synth you’ve ever used (unless you’ve specifically gone looking for alternatives) is tuned to 12edo.
But 12 is just one choice. You could slice the octave into 7 pieces, or 19, or 31, or 53. Each number gives you a different set of pitches, different chords, different moods, different capabilities. The world of xenharmonic music is largely about exploring what happens when you make different choices here.
The number of notes isn’t the point
Here’s the key insight that took me a while to fully absorb: when you work with a large EDO, you don’t use all the notes at once.
Think about it this way. A standard piano has 88 keys. But when you sit down to play a piece in C major, you’re primarily thinking about 7 notes. You’re not paralyzed by the other 81 keys. You’ve zoomed in on a scale — a subset of the full system — and you work within that.
The exact same principle applies to 41edo or 53edo. The full system has many notes, yes. But you’re going to pick a subset and work with that. The extra notes are just options you haven’t used yet, sitting there quietly in case you need them.
Large EDOs are mostly familiar notes with extras added in
Here’s something that might surprise you: many large EDOs contain your familiar 12edo notes almost perfectly, just with extra notes tucked between and around them.
53edo is a famous example of this. It does an extraordinarily good job of approximating just intonation — the pure, mathematically simple intervals that musicians used before equal temperament took over. But it also contains something very close to the standard 12-note chromatic scale. When you use 53edo, you’re not abandoning everything you know. You’re expanding it. Your C, D, E, F, G, A, B are all still there. They’re just joined by a crowd of friendly neighbors.
This is related to a concept called temperament — the idea that a tuning system can be understood partly in terms of how it approximates simpler, purer intervals. Large EDOs are often good at this because they have more notes available to get close to those pure targets.
Think in intervals, not in note names
One of the biggest mindset shifts that makes large EDOs feel manageable is to stop thinking in absolute note names and start thinking in intervals.
In 12edo, you’ve internalized intervals: a major third is 4 semitones, a perfect fifth is 7 semitones, and so on. You don’t think “I’m playing C and E” — you think “I’m playing a major third.” The note names are almost incidental.
You can do exactly the same thing in any EDO. In 31edo, a meantone major third is 10 steps. In 53edo, a near-pure major third is 17 steps. Once you learn the interval “shapes” of the system you’re working in, the total number of available notes fades into the background. You’re just playing the intervals you want, built from whatever root you choose.
The vocabulary you need to internalize is probably only a dozen or two intervals deep — roughly the same cognitive load as learning your way around any new mode or scale.
Modes and scales: your anchor points in a large EDO
When composers and improvisers work with large EDOs, they almost always define a mode or scale as their home base. Just as you might work primarily in Dorian or Lydian in 12edo, you find a subset of your large EDO that has the character you want.
Some of these scales are well-known in xenharmonic circles. For instance, working within a diatonic or chromaticstructure inside a large EDO gives you familiar melodic motion but with subtly purer or differently-colored harmonics. Others are more exotic — scales with 10 or 14 notes that have no real equivalent in 12edo — but even those are just scales. A finite set of notes you’ve decided to call home for a piece of music.
Many large EDOs support MOS scales (Moment of Symmetry scales), which are a mathematically elegant family of scales with a very regular, singable structure. Learning a couple of MOS scales that live inside your chosen EDO is often the fastest route to actually making music with it rather than theorizing about it.
The “too many notes” feeling is a 12edo bias
Here’s a slightly uncomfortable truth: the feeling that 41 or 53 notes is “too many” is partly just familiarity bias. 12 feels natural because you’ve spent years internalizing it. But 12 is actually a fairly small EDO, and it has real limitations — it can’t produce certain pure intervals without noticeable beating, and it collapses distinctions (like the difference between a syntonic comma) that other systems preserve.
A musician raised on 53edo from childhood would find 12edo laughably coarse. They’d feel like they were working with a piano that had three-quarters of its keys ripped out.
The cognitive load of a tuning system isn’t really about the total number of available pitches — it’s about the number of pitches you’re actively tracking at once, which is roughly the size of your scale. And that’s a number you control.
Practical ways to get started
If you want to actually play around with a large EDO rather than just think about it, here are some concrete entry points:
Start with a familiar scale shape. Load up a large EDO in software like Surge XT or a retuning tool like Leimma, and find the notes that correspond to a simple major or minor scale. Play that. Get your ears adjusted to the slightly different tuning colors before branching out.
Explore rank-2 temperaments. Many large EDOs are great hosts for specific temperament families. 53edo is famous for Mercator temperament and its exceptional just intonation approximations. 41edo supports miracle temperament. These temperaments come with their own scale structures that give you a ready-made framework for navigation.
Use a generalized keyboard layout or isomorphic interface. Tools like the Lumatone or even an Axis-49 can be configured to lay out any EDO in a pattern that makes intervallic relationships visual and physical. When the layout is consistent, large EDOs become much more navigable.
Give yourself a one-week “just the pentatonic” challenge. Pick five notes out of your EDO. Write or improvise with only those five for a week. You’ll be amazed what you find, and you’ll end the week with your ears genuinely tuned to the system.
Why bother? What do you actually gain?
So why go through any of this, when 12edo works fine for basically all the music most of us listen to?
A few honest answers:
Richer harmony. Large EDOs can produce just or near-just chords that have a purity and resonance 12edo can only approximate. If you’ve ever heard a barbershop quartet lock into a chord and felt it ring in a way a piano chord doesn’t, that’s just intonation at work. Large EDOs can get you close to that in a tempered, playable system.
New melodic colors. Intervals that don’t exist in 12edo — neutral thirds, subminor intervals, ultra-wide or ultra-narrow seconds — carry emotional qualities that are genuinely novel. They’re not just “in-between” in a vague sense; they’re specific, expressive, and learnable.
Expanded compositional vocabulary. Once you internalize even one or two large EDOs, you start hearing 12edo’s limitations as limitations rather than as the natural order of things. Your compositional palette grows.
It’s genuinely fun. There’s something delightful about discovering that the musical universe is vastly larger than you thought — and that most of it is accessible with the same basic skills you already have.
The bottom line
Large EDOs look scary from the outside because the numbers are big. But once you’re inside one, working with a scale you’ve chosen, building intervals you’ve learned, writing music you care about — the total size of the system becomes almost irrelevant. It’s background information, like knowing that the English language has 170,000 words while you write a postcard.
You don’t need to learn all 53 notes of 53edo any more than you need to learn all 12 chromatic notes before you’re allowed to play in C major. Pick a subset. Get comfortable. Expand when you’re ready.
The notes are there when you need them. Until then, they’ll wait patiently.
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