If you're going to play Arabic Music using equal temperament, such 24-tone ET, probably soon you'll find issues like: Eb in Nahwand is lower, Eb in Hijaz is higher and F# is lower, E1/2b is lower in Bayati and higher in Rast, A in Jiharkah is lower etc. And if you try to give an appropriate intonation to those notes they'll stand out among the others, because all the others are equally tempered and they're not. So the melody sounds more artificial and harder to the ear. Even if you use a temperament with more notes, such as 72-tone ET, sometimes it becomes an arbitrary decision to lower or raise a note and you'll also end up with many notes that you almost never use.
This is why I developed the 48-tone just intonation below. The basis for it are mentioned briefly in the home page of this site. You can try to calculate the numbers yourself if you want to study it. Some values were slightly adjusted to fit some of the ratios available in the book "Tableau Comparatif des Intervales Musicaux" by Alain Daniélou.
What is nice in this system is that the melody flows smoothly because the notes are not equally tempered. They are tuned by ratios. The result is that for each one of the 24 notes that are "written" in Arabic Music, you'll find a higher an lower version in my table, that you may use naturally according to each maqam. You can also use some kinds of 3rds, 4ths, 5ths and 6ths in the accompaniment and they'll sound like pure intervals.
The 48-tone intonation is very practical for Middle-Eastern music. However if you want to use this system to transpose to complex keys or if you want to play Western harmony you can use the 53-tone table bellow.
It has the same values of the 48-tone table, plus five additional notes where there were larger gaps between the tuning of two notes.
Using the 53-tone just intonation you can transpose makam music to any key, you can play any major or minor chord of western music and even add a major or minor seventh to it. If you start any chord from the lower version of the notes: C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A, A#/Bb, B; it will sound as a just intonation chord with a maximum error of 1,95 cents (one schisma), even if you add a seventh to it. And if you start any chord from the higher version of one of these notes you'll get a maximum error of 6,37 cents. So you can have just intonation, in any key, without having to re-tune the whole instrument or the whole audio file using the table below.
Even though the tables themselves are intellectual proprieties, anyone is free to use the data on them to create 48-tone or 53-tone just intonation music or instruments. If you adopt my intonation system I'll be glad to know the results. Please, send them to me. Thank you.
