Quarter Tone Musician

The Quarter Tone Musician Project

The Quarter Tone Musician project is an initiative whose goals are: to introduce musicians to the world of quarter tones, provide learning and reference materials to composers and instrumentalists, provide apps to facilitate quarter tone performance practice and composition, and expand the sphere of influence of quarter tones.

Quarter Tone Musician serves as a unified hub for quarter-tone musicians, offering instructional content, repertoire, and practical tools such as tuning aids, a chord creator, and scale generators. The overarching goal is to support musicians in understanding and integrating quarter tones into their work, fostering growth and innovation in the field of microtonal music.

Composition

Brandon Quinn’s book, Introduction to Quarter Tone Composition, introduces composers to the world of 24-TET, the unique types of melodies and harmonies made possible by quarter tones, and provides instructions on how to compose quarter tone music for common instruments.

Saxophone

Quinn’s book, Quarter Tone Technique for Saxophone, introduces multiple fingerings for all playable quarter tones throughout the range, gives studies in quarter tone scales and chords, and ten etudes that fully exploit the quarter tone technique and the unique melodies and harmonies this technique makes possible.

Repertoire

This website maintains a growing list of quarter tone composers and their repertoire. The full list can be found on our repertoire page, and individual composers, compositions, or instruments can be found via the search page.

All composers

Apps

This website has a series of apps aimed at facilitating quarter tone composition and performance practice, including the chord creator app and quarter tone tuner app. Visit our apps page for the full list of apps we provide.