I was recently invited to be part of an article on electronic instruments and microtonality in the German language publication Virtuos, released by GEMA, a European society for music performance and mechanical reproduction rights similar to ASCAP or BMI. With a circulation of 60,000, GEMA reaches a wide audience of composers, songwrites, and music publishers around the world.



Editor Kristina Balbach interviewed me by email, giving me an opportunity to talk a bit about the importance of expanded pitch resources and the inspiration behind Tonal Plexus keyboards. I was excited and pleased to see the final article begin with some paraphrases of things I had submitted. References to the h-pi website and a photo of a TPX2 also appear further into the article.



Technical director of GEMA, composer, and TPX owner Markus Dieck is featured in the article, discussing his many years of experience working with microtones and the inspiration that the latest musical technology is bringing to his work.



I’m struck once again by what a small world we live in, and yet how colorful and full of possibilities it is. Interconnected individuals bring about fortuitous developments like this. Thanks to Markus Dieck, Kristina Balbach, the team at Virtuos, and GEMA.

In case you didn’t catch the latest from WikiLeaks, the H-Pi software web pages have been updated with new layouts and graphics, and the software purchase pages have been consolidated into one new software uber-page.

Also, if you tried to view the H-Pi website between about 7:30 PM EST July 27 and 5:30 PM EST July 28, you would have been greeted with a 404 Error. The website was unavailable during that time interval, about 22 hours down. Any emails sent to @h-pi.com addresses during that time should be sent again. My apologies for the outage and any inconvenience this may have caused.

There have recently also been some issues with @h-pi emails getting lost in cyberspace, so I have started using a gmail account in order to communicate more reliably. That address is h [ dot ] pi [ dot ] instruments ( at ) gmail [ dot ] com. Keep in touch!

I get a lot of questions by email. Sometimes for tech support I’ve used Yahoo Messenger chat. A problem with that is, people who don’t already use Messenger have to download the software, set up an account, etc., and not everyone wants to do that. So, I decided it would be useful to have a custom web-based chat that would be easy to use for anyone who is online. The result is H-Pi Live Chat, a reasonably robust chat client I developed from a bare-bones open source chat project aptly named microchat.

At the login screen, you’ll find one of three greetings:

1. I’m online and available to chat
2. I’m online, but I’m helping someone else
3. I’m offline, but you can login anyway if you like

Live Chat allows any number of people to login, so it’s actually a chat room that can be used for conferencing. As the owner, I can lock out new logins at any time. Also, logins are announced, so there’s no a danger of a lurker listening in covertly. So, for example, if you are in a band of four members called The Four Tuning Geeks, and you all want to chat, we can all login, I can lock it, and we can have a semi-private conversation.

I say "semi-private", because the chat connection is unencrypted, open and public. If someone really wanted to eavesdrop, they could find a way to do it. Since I imagine you are probably not in the habit of shouting out your credit card numbers when discussing tuning issues, I think we’re all pretty safe.

Well, that’s enough blathering … Give it a try!

It was recently brought to my attention that the H-Pi website had some serious navigation and display issues when viewed on Windows machines running Internet Explorer 8, and I’m happy to hereby proclaim that those issues have been resolved … unless you find more problems.

Even though IE works (again) now as far as I can tell, I recommend PC users switch to Safari for Windows. It looks better and works better than IE. If you don’t want to install an Apple product, please try switching to Firefox. Both Safari and Firefox are superior to IE in both display and overall performance.

Website feedback is appreciated. Recently I took some time to improve the site in some general ways. Please remember that I code everything on the website, and if you see a problem, I want to know about it as soon as possible. Thanks!

Taken at a Board of Trustees presentation at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, June 14, and sent to me from renowned experimental guitarist and head of the Berklee microtonal music club, David Fiuczynski, we see in the above photo, pictured from left, David Fiuczynski (a.k.a. Fuze), Berklee President Roger Brown and keyboard student Takeru Yamazaki.

The green TPX4s keyboard belongs to Takeru. On top of the keyboard is what looks like a Korg mini-KP (KAOSS Pad). I’m told the event included a performance involving Tonal Plexus keyboards, and I hope to have some more details to share soon. Thanks for the photo, Fuze!