It’s a human tendency to assume that the things we grow up with are natural–just the way things are meant to be. Take music, for example. As Bill Gates famously observed, “Twelve tones ought to be enough for anybody.” Or maybe that was Mozart. Anyway, those of us in the West might think the equal tempered twelve-tone scale is natural (even though it took thousands of years and loads of adventures to arrive in its present form), but there are lots of people out there with a different opinion. Here’s a nice little app that lets you explore a musical space that might be completely new to you.

Microtonal eXplorer (MtX) allows you to create scales with any number of tones and any arrangement of intervals, then play riffs and chords from your new scale. Name your scale and save it in the database for later. Pull it out again whenever you feel like a little trip.

The application is available FREE on Google Play.