Last update: October 08, 2026

Microtone Touch

About

Microtone Touch is a pattern-based music sketchpad for mobile phones, and the companion to the Microtone tracker. It was released on 6 October 2026 and runs in the phone's web browser.

Tracker note entry has traditionally borrowed two rows of the computer keyboard as a piano keyboard, a mapping built around twelve notes to the octave. Touch replaces it with an isomorphic touch keyboard, on which every interval has the same shape wherever it is played. Its layouts are generated from each tuning's own fifth, so the same four layouts serve 18 equal temperaments from 4 to 53 steps, Bohlen–Pierce and the twelve lü.

The pattern side is a reduced tracker. A song has eight lanes and up to sixteen sections, and each section holds one 64-row pattern per lane. A cell holds a note or a key-off and at most one effect; there are no volume or panning columns. Eight instruments are built in and synthesised on the device, so no samples are shipped.

Sketches are kept in the phone's browser storage, or online through a SceneID account shared with Microtone, which opens them as ordinary projects. The sketch file format, .mtsk, is openly specified, and a sketch can also be exported as a self-contained .taud file.

Key features

Isomorphic multi-touch keyboard: Wicki–Hayden, Bosanquet–Wilson, harmonic table and degree run
Tunings: 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-, 12-, 15-, 16-, 17-, 19-, 22-, 24-, 31-, 41-, 43- and 53-TET; Bohlen–Pierce; the twelve lü at C = 262 Hz (a-ak) or C = 311 Hz (hyang-ak)
"Fat fingers" mode: one touch between keys plays a third, a fifth or a triad
Eight lanes, sixteen sections of 64 rows, four effects (slide, vibrato, roll, fade), 25–1048 BPM
Live recording over a looping section or the whole song
Instruments: piano, electric piano, bass, pluck, lead, pad, organ and an eight-piece drum kit
Storage in the browser, or online with a SceneID account; Microtone opens online sketches as projects
.mtsk sketch files, typically a few hundred bytes; .taud export
English and Korean interface; dark, dim and light themes
Ambidexterous layout and split-screen support for foldable phones
Distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3