Heinz Bohlen

Heinz P. Bohlen (26 June 1935 – 2 February 2016)^[1][2] was a microwave electronics and communications engineer.

He designed and described numerous non-octave musical scales (alternative musical tunings and temperaments), many based on combination tones, including the Bohlen–Pierce scale in 1972 (independently discovered by John R. Pierce in 1984, also a microwave electronics and communications engineer, six years later and Kees van Prooijen in 1978),^[3] the A12 scale, and the 833 cents scale.

Bohlen began to question and investigate tunings in the early 1970s when a friend and graduate student at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater asked him to begin recording concerts at the school. Bohlen asked students why all their music used twelve-tone equal temperament, including the octave, and, dissatisfied with the answers, began to investigate alternate tunings.^[1]

Sources

Microtonal music
Composers	Easley Blackwood Jr. Heinz Bohlen Wendy Carlos Julián Carrillo Mildred Couper Ivor Darreg John Eaton Adriaan Fokker Alois Hába Lou Harrison Christiaan Huygens Ben Johnston Joel Mandelbaum Joe Maneri Harry Partch Ezra Sims Nicola Vicentino Elaine Walker Ivan Wyschnegradsky
Tunings and scales	Non-octave- repeating scales Alpha scale Beta scale Gamma scale Delta scale Lambda scale (Bohlen–Pierce scale) Equal temperament 15 17 19 22 24 31 34 41 53 58 72 Just intonation Harry Partch's 43-tone scale Triple diatonic
Concepts and techniques	Limit Otonality and Utonality Semitone Sonido 13 Xenharmonicity
Groups and publications	Boston Microtonal Society Genesis of a Music Huygens-Fokker Foundation Tonalsoft Xenharmonic Bulletin
Compositions	Beauty in the Beast quarter tone pieces just pieces Mother Sonata for Microtonal Piano Suite for Microtonal Piano Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media
Other topics	Enharmonic keyboard Generalized keyboard Modernism (music)