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“Timbre is the new harmony…”

Jacky Ligon

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, music software-developer, sound-designer, visual and video artist. Currently residing in the United States, Jacky has composed music for theater, film, video-art, as well as both solo and collaborative independent record releases in a broad range of musical styles.

Since the 1980s he has been exploring the vast expressive possibilities of composing music with alternative musical instrument intonation systems (just intonation, temperaments, microtonal), as well as research involving scale-design and investigations into the relationships between intonation systems and musical instrument timbre.

From 2010 to 2019, Jacky founded and operated the Xen-Arts software development and musical instrument intonation research project (formerly at Xen-Arts.net). Xen-Arts was a collaborative project involving a group of programmers, researchers, musicians and composers from around the world, and produced a suite of educational freeware virtual-instruments and tutorials designed for learning about computer-music software sound-design, as well as for composing music with alternative musical instrument intonation systems beyond the ubiquitous Western 12-tone-equal-temperament.