The founders of TONALSOFT™ have a passion for music, and especially in nuturing the somewhat neglected discipline of just intonation and microtonal music. Our founders have the unique combination of skills, motivation, and long-term vision for bringing innovative microtonal electronic music software applications to market.
Joe Monzo is the Chief Musican and has been a microtonal and just intonation music composer for a number of years. Prior to TONALSOFT™, Joe Monzo founded the Dictionary of Tuning Terms, now called the TONALSOFT™ Encyclopedia of Microtonal Music-theory, which is one of the premier information sources on microtonal music theory. While developing the dictionary, he was also the webmaster at sonic-arts.org, where he was one of the microtonal musicians in residence. Sonic Arts is a foundation dedicated to the advancement of microtonal and just intonation music. Additionally, Joe Monzo was one of the primary contributors and organizers for a number of microtonal-tuning, and mathematical tuning internet discussion groups. It was during this time that his original interest in just intonation was augmented by advanced mathematics.
Joe Monzo was first introduced to just intonation by reading Harry Partch's book, Genesis of a Music, while he attended the Manhattan School of Music as a composition major. Thereafter, he was inspired to expand on Partch's ideas and to publish his own theory on microtonal music in a book called "JustMusic: A New Harmony". Joe Monzo was responsible for introducing Chris Wittmann to Harry Partch's approach to just intonation music composition.
Some Microtonal Pieces