CTM Festival
Apotome, a free browser-based generative music system focused on microtonal music, became available on January 22nd. Its key characteristic is that it allows users to work with many types of tuning systems from different cultures—African, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Turkish as well as Western experimental and historical ones.
This project was created as part of musician Khyam Allami’s PhD research and the third music application he has developed in collaboration with Counterpoint studio in the last several years. Previous projects include Leimma, which allows intuitive and immediate browser-based exploration of tunings, and Comma patch also presented at CTM back in 2019. According to its creators, “these applications are an effort to highlight the cultural asymmetries and biases inherent in modern music-making tools, alongside their interconnected web of musical, educational, cultural, social, and political ramifications. They are an attempt to present decolonised music applications that allows music-makers from any culture to have the freedom of a musical tabula rasa (blank slate)”.
Khyam Allami is a London-based musician, oud player, composer, and researcher of Iraqi descent, the founder of Nawa Recordings, known for releasing Egyptian experimental artists Nadah El Shazly and Maurice Louca. Allami’s artistic research focuses on the development of contemporary and experimental practice based on the fundamentals of Arabic music.
