Dijilele, a new musical instrument company based in Waterloo, Ontario recently unveiled a new class of fretted digital instruments with microtonal capabilities.
Anya Wassenberg is the Toronto City Editor and senior writer at Ludwig Van. For three decades, she worked as a freelance writer and blogger with a strong specialty in culture and travel, and as a creative writing instructor for OntarioLearn. Many of her pieces have been quoted and used in the bibliographies of academic papers and publications, and she is a current jury member for the Polaris Music Prize. Under the artist name Anya Mia, she is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and hosts a monthly open mic for writers in her hometown of Hamilton, ON.
Microtonal music may be all the rage in the realm of pop music these days, due to the surprising and overwhelming success of Québec based band Angine de Poitrine.
The tradition of microtonal music, however, dates back date back thousands of years in the classical Indian, Persian, and Arabic/Turkish maqam systems. Even in Europe, experiments with microtonal music back to the 17th century.
Those traditions live on in acoustic instruments like the Persian setar, part of the lute family.
But, until now, once you entered the digital music realm, there were no dedicated instruments capable of producing microtones.
Dijilele, a new digital musical instruments company based in Waterloo, Ontario recently unveiled a new class of instruments in Toronto at the Queen Street West Art Crawl, demonstrated by award-winning composer and performer Dr. Mehrdad Jafari Raad, and Wilfrid Laurier Faculty of Music student Jonathan Markov.
The company’s two new instruments — Dijilele M, and Dijilele S — are currently in production. The sensor-based digital musical instruments have been designed to make music making, and microtonal sounds, accessible to even novice players.
The Dijilele S resembles a soprano ukelele, and combines digital and electronic music in a fretted instrument format. The Dijilele M supports microtonal scales and tunings, expanding on the acoustic ukelele, which can produce fixed notes in 12-tone equal temperament. It takes fretted instruments beyond their typical limitations.
Dr. Mehrdad Jafari Raad, an award-winning composer and performer on the Dijilele as a MIDI controller with a library of sounds:
Both Dijilele instruments can be played independently, or used as MIDI controllers, allowing for the exploration of both conventional Western and microtonal music.
The Dijilele M has a range of features designed for accessibility as well as exploration.
LV caught up with Dijilele’s Ali Tehrani and Mehrdad Jafari Raad to talk about the innovative instruments.
Raad teaches with the Dijilele S and M.
“The instrument the Dijilele, or we called it setar, it’s modelled after an Iranian instrument, the setar.” Raad explains. “It’s a common instrument,” he adds.
“This is the electronic version of that. The way you would play it is exactly the same as you would play the setar. The way you handle it and play it, it’s exactly the same instrument as the setar.”
As he points out, there are already several digital fretted instrument, and MIDI guitars, but they aren’t capable of playing microtones as is.
The acoustic setar is played with the fingernails, a technique that takes some time to learn effectively, as Tehrani explains. “It has four strings, and it’s played with your nail.” It’s an instrument with a 2,000 year history, as he points out.
“I used to play this, and I still do. I thought it would be wonderful if we could turn this to a digital version so that it becomes accessible to more people.” While he says it’s not difficult to produce a sound per se, it can take years to master the traditional setar.
“I thought, if I made this digital, it’s going to be easier to learn, and easier to integrate into other musical instruments,” Tehrani says. “It’s hard to convince someone to learn this for two to three years and then use it.”
The digital design was made with ease of use in mind. “It’s not so picky how you strum it,” Ali says. “It gives Western musicians the chance to use microtones.”
As Tehrani notes, there are Western musicians who use a modified keyboard or guitar to produce microtonal music, or via manipulation using a digital audio workstation (DAW), but that requires some technical know-how. “They get a standard keyboard and they tune the keys into desirable frequencies.”
The new instruments have that capability built in.
From his initial idea, Tehrani dove into a series of experiments and prototypes.
“I’ve been working on this since 2011. It was much harder than it appeared to me in the beginning,” he notes. “I made the first prototype in 2011, and I showed it to some musicians, got some feedback.”
It took several years to develop a model that was easily playable for anyone from beginner to advanced. By 2015, he had a model that he shopped around to various music festivals, again looking for feedback.
“It was an evolution to get to this, where someone can play it comfortably,” Tehrani says. “In the acoustic version of these instruments, because the string is there, and you have to push the string towards the frets to create a strong note, it needs calluses on the fingers,” he points out. “Some people can’t tolerate that.”
His concept was to introduce an instrument that didn’t require that level of physical adjustment. “People are going to stick to that.”
As a music teacher, Mehrdad Jafari Raad knew about the struggles of beginning students all too well.
“We started last year with a few students that didn’t have any experience playing any instruments,” he says. “I noticed that the learning curve, comparing it with the acoustic setar, they can make a proper sound with the instrument.”
Even those students with no prior experience were able to play a recognizable melody more quickly.
“With the acoustic setar, there are weeks and weeks of learning [to get to that point],” he says. With the acoustic setar, students need to work on each hand separately just to master the basic movements required.
The digital instrument not only eliminates that early struggle, it allows for students to play with others much more quickly as well. “They start playing together as an ensemble. It’s definitely easy pieces of music,” he allows, “but that wouldn’t be possible with setar or tar.” The tar is another stringed instrument used in the classical traditions of Iran, Azerbaijan, and the Caucasus regions.
“That was interesting to me. I think the students were more likely to continue when they feel like they are creating music,” Raad adds.
As they progress, the hope is that students may eventually become interested in the traditional instrument as well.
“One of the goals is to get them eventually to be interested in the acoustic instrument,” Tehrani says.
“It needs a bit of adjustment for that transition,” Mehrdad says, “but it’s much much easier than starting from scratch.”
“When this idea came to my mind, one of my hopes was that people who get introduced to this kind of music through this instrument, after a while, they get encouraged to seek the origin of this instrument,” Ali says. “That’s a huge excitement for them.”
He says that, after a few months of training on the digital instrument, students could comfortably play the acoustic version, using the same techniques.
“That was one of the major goals,” Tehrani underscores, “this is a kind of intercultural thing. When you have in your culture something that is beautiful and useful, you want to share this,” he said.
He wanted to facilitate that aspect. “It is hard to convince people in Western culture to learn this instrument because of the learning curve,” he notes. “But in ten minutes, they can create beautiful sounds.”
He recalls teaching a Canadian student a Persian song in about two minutes. “He was very excited,” Ali says. “This kind of intercultural component is really encouraging.”
The instruments are currently in production in China, with an anticipated delivery date of early December.
As Tehrani notes, the final version looks slightly different than the video above. “We created a new version of that, and we changed the bowl shape. In this family of instruments, some people use picks to play, some people using different strumming techniques. We realized with the new shape, the bowl type is going to cover all kinds of strumming.”
It’s also designed with other instrumentalists in mind. “If someone is a guitar player and wants to use all fingers to play it.”
The newest version resembles a ukelele.
Raad points out that it’s a versatile tool for composition as well as learning and playing. When you move from paper and manuscript paper to DAWs and laptops, the way you write music changes too.
“You would compose differently — the ideas are the same, but the process is different,” he says. “When you hold the instrument, and it is capable of doing microtonals without changing the settings and doing all that work, it would change how you compose,” he adds.
“An instrument can be a composing partner.”
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