Kids today, with their 31 equal divisions of the octave. Yes, it’s the music of Nicolà Vicentino, a Renaissance theorist and composer who built his own microtonal harpsichord to accommodate his experimental tunings. But it’s not just a theoretical experiment: there is some connection to musical practice (even if Vicentino was basically making this up). Food for thought as we mess with digital tuning systems and microonality.” Microtonality is having a moment, partly because of a need just to escape the sameness of our commodified world, and also because tech is making it easier to work with. But it’s not that this is something that exists only in math, or that it’s terribly new, or even that “microtonality” is always the most accurate word. In fact, Vicenza-born Vicentino has this in common with modern Western musicians: he was messing around with some theory, abstracted from its context.…