Microtonal music has gotten a boost with the release of a new notational software for microtonal composition.

The software is called Mus2. Version 1.0 was released about 2 months ago. Mus2 is a GUI-based music composition tool along the lines of the two industry dominant (competing) composition applications, Finale and Sibelius, but less mature and full-featured except for microtonal support, in which Mus2 is years ahead of the industry leaders.

Mus2 allows the composer to visually:

• compose using quartertones
• compose using certain other interesting intervals defined in Western microtonal theory
• compose in classic and modern Turkish music intervals
• create new note pitches
• create new notational symbols to represent these pitches
• play it all back!

I've been using Finale for 9 years and while I've been satisfied with its ability to handle symphonic composition, I grew exasperated by the superficiality of its microtonal support, which is purely notational (and inadequate at that) and devoid of usable playback capability.

Sibelius, which I have tried in a full demo, is only slightly better, being marginally adequate for quarter-tone composition, offering no support for just intonation and having only a clunky and buggy playback plug-in.

The problem is that neither the Finale team nor the Sibelius team really get microtonal music. That's not a problem for the author(s) of Mus2: they live and code in Turkey, a nation whose popular and classical music falls entirely within what Western music theory calls "microtonal", a somewhat fuzzy term that effectively means"other than the Western even temperament 12-tone octave-based scale system".

Overall, Mus2 is a strikingly well-designed application for Windows or the Macintosh. Its user interface is unusual but very quickly intuitive. Clearly the authors are intelligent, focused and capable. One hopes that the rewards from this inexpensive (US$40) will keep development going and that Mus2 will contine to grow.