PETER VAN ZANDT LANE
Max patches n' stuff
Pythagorean Lambdoma Harmonic Keyboard
When I began working at UGA in 2015, the electronic music studios had recently acquired a Pythagorean Lambdoma Harmonic Keyboard for a doctoral composition research project. These were created by Barbara Hero in the 90's, based on Pythagoras's Tetractys table converted into a playable surface. The Lambdoma Keyboard is an excellent tool for exploring microtonality using a pretty straightforward ratio-based frequency system.
UGA's Media Studio (with the PLHK among the controllers)
Barbara Hero's Pythagorean Lambdoma Harmonic Keyboard
The keyboard is a little clunky and could only run on old software on a PC not compatible with recent operating systems even a decade ago. I spent an afternoon mapping all of the MIDI messages to their associated ratios and created a new interface you can even run it from an iPad using Mira, and have your own miniature lambdoma keyboard to experiment with. Of course, if you happen to have one of the official hardware instruments, you can plug that in and use this as a simple synthesizer for it as well. I also included ways to replace the fundamental with other frequencies (Barbara Hero's lambdoma keyboard was fixed at 432Hz, of course).
You can download the patch below and run it in Max 8 or 9. Enjoy!
I'm not much of a microtonal or just-intonation enthusiast, so haven't made much music with this tool (though I have used it to try to help explain Vincenzo Galilei's mind-bending arguments on tuning systems to a Renaissance Counterpoint class). There's just (hehe) a couple tracks of my kinda-weird-singer-songwriter album Vectory Gardens that make use of the Pythagorean Lambdoma Harmonic Keyboard (tracks 5 and 10).
If you have Max, you can run the PLHK patch by downloading the zip file below. Just make sure that the "Lambdoma Map.maxpat" file stays in the same folder as the "subosc.maxpat" file. Enjoy!