Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media

In the late 1970s, Blackwood won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the harmonic and modal properties of microtonal tunings.

The project culminated in the Microtonal Etudes, composed as illustrations of the tonal possibilities of all the equal tunings from 13 to 24 notes to the octave.

The suite was performed by guitarist Jeffrey Kust on an acoustic guitar with a modified fretboard.

The album, featuring the Budapest Scoring Orchestra, was produced by Sheeran, who arranged Blackwood's original compositions for traditional orchestral instruments.

These preliminary recordings were then transformed into their intended tunings using the Melodyne electronic retuning software.