Xenharmonic Reference:Roadmap

Shortcut: XR:RM

The xenhamonic roadmap is the in-progress vision for the community. In short, our goal is tuning diversity and our method is cooperation above all else.

The definition of xenharmony is disputed. It may be viewed as a specific movement within Western music pioneered by Ivor Darreg and his contemporaries. He coined the term, and his network of musicians became the Xenharmonic Alliance. We choose to move outward from these founding concepts, prioritizing tuning diversity itself. With "xen" meaning "strange", xenharmony is about exploring every type of musical tuning that a composer may find useful, and sometimes even those they may not. It is a fundamentally musical practice, but we will always be more than just a music community. In order to develop it, we cannot be separated from systemcraft and radical pluralism.

If music is how tuning is ultimately used, systemcraft is how tuning systems and their associated concepts are made. A person may only be a compose or only be a theorist, but we thrive on our synergy. A problem that the online xenharmonic community has been trying to address for a long time is that systemcraft is often easier and more fun than composing for people like us, who would rather create a puzzle and solve it than explore the unstructured and daunting task of artistic expression. The solution is to make composing easier with resources and more fun with events.

Our main problem in this community is proper communication. It causes semantic disagreements that could easily be resolved with better terminology, and it causes people to be islands of their own theories with little cooperation. XenReference was created for the purpose of everyone getting to document their own work and collaborate on the work of others to create a network of understanding that's as robust as it can be. Arguing and reinventing the wheel may be fun, but we can work towards a balance in which they become truly productive for the advancement of xenharmonic praxis. As community leaders, we should only need to enforce two things: being kind and accepting the vision.

XenReference is meant to have a different format from past documentation based on this spirit of communication and ease of finding new information. Articles are collaborations between authors with different personal perspectives through the use of usertags. Flag planting is discouraged as it encourages a culture of constantly finding new ways to do things rather than creating a more complete body of knowledge. Thousands of entries for temperaments and commas are replaced with lists or sections of other articles, and names are accepted based on their usage rather than whoever coined them first.