Verovio microtonal support

The open source software Verovio is one of the established music engraving tools. It provides the ability to export music scores to standard MIDI files. My work consisted of adding microtonal support to Verovio’s MIDI export. This was done by integrating the Ableton tuning definition format (ASCL) into Verovio, via another library called “tuning-library” which I also patched. By linking music scores to tuning definitions, scores can be retuned to any tuning via export to MIDI including MTS (MIDI tuning System).

One of the challenges of music software is to support non-mainstream, non-Western music systems. Even 20th century Western microtonal music is not easily represented in software, because the assumptions of 12-tone equal temperament are baked deep into the architecture of music software. Whereas MIDI’s tuning system has supported custom tunings for decades, music engraving software has been lagging in this domain. My work consisted of adding this ability.

Contributing to give underfunded and under-represented music cultures the ability to preserve their musical heritage is the aim of this work. For example, the Arabic music web site Maqamatna (https://maqamatna.com/) has adopted the latest version of Verovio with microtonal support to convert their music scores to MIDI and play them back online.