This is not a music review. It’s a proposal for a jurisprudential methodology that takes its organising metaphor from music theory but its critical object from law’s refusal to register what its own categories cannot hold.
In 2017, the Australian psyche-rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard released Flying Microtonal Banana. To make it, the band had a friend modify a guitar to play in 24-TET tuning, in the style of a bağlama, dividing the octave into twenty-four equal intervals rather than the standard twelve, and then gave every band member four hundred Australian dollars to do the same to their own instruments. The result was an album that, by the band’s own account, gave them something new, “fresh and exciting”. The band’s frontman, Stu Mackenzie, described the music as, “between other notes, and it just sounds different, and it’s blowing my mind.” The challenge was not simply technical, it was epistemological: how do you make audible a set of intervals that the dominant tuning system has declared non-existent?
Nearly a decade later, the Quebec math-rock duo, Angine de Poitrine, went further. Their drummer, Klek, built a microtonal double-neck guitar by hand, adding extra frets with a saw. Their 2024 debut and its successor brought this double-necked instrument, which is part electric guitar, part bass, all dissonance, to viral prominence, and introduced millions to a sound hovering in the space that standard Western notation has no obvious symbol for.
The Standard Tuning of Law
Legal reasoning operates by dividing the available normative space into a fixed number of intervals. Lawful or unlawful. Right or no right. Person or property. Public or private. These distinctions are not natural facts, they are tuning decisions, choices about how finely to divide normative space, made at specific historical moments, by specific institutional actors, for specific purposes. Like the piano’s equal temperament, which fixed and standardised what had previously been variable, legal categories achieve their clarity and reproducibility at the cost of everything that falls between the frets.
Consider tort law’s threshold for cognisable harm. The law of negligence recognises damage that is physical, psychiatric, or economic in defined circumstances. What it does not register, what falls systematically below the threshold of legal recognition, is the vast range of dignitary injury, relational disruption, and cumulative low-level harm that people experience as real and serious, but that doctrine has decided is too fine-grained to adjudicate. The rounding is not incidental but reflects a prior decision about what kind of harm counts as legally audible, made by courts operating within a tuning system that was never designed to hear it. Similar operations are visible in the public/private distinction in human rights law, which produces clean categorical outcomes at the cost of erasing the normative texture of experience that does not fit neatly on either side, and in property law’s chronic difficulty with informal, relational, or communal entitlements that resist the vocabulary of title and ownership.
Microtonal jurisprudence, therefore, names a critical methodology attentive to that cost. Its central question is not whether law’s categories are wrong (often they are defensible, even necessary) but what they render legally inaudible in the process of becoming determinate.
The Instrument Has to Be Modified
What is striking about both King Gizzard and Angine de Poitrine is that microtonality required physical intervention in the instrument itself. Standard guitars cannot produce these intervals. Klek added frets with a saw. The band gave everyone a budget to modify what they already had. You cannot simply decide to play microtonally on standard equipment because the apparatus resists.
This is jurisprudentially instructive because existing legal methodologies, including doctrinal analysis, normative theory, and perhaps even the more disruptive methods of critical legal studies, are still largely built for standard tuning. They can identify the wrong note or argue for a different key (e.g., rights theory’s expansion of protected interests), but they remain within a system that accepts the semitone as the smallest meaningful interval. What microtonal jurisprudence adds is a self-conscious account of why the exclusion is structural, not merely ideological or contingent, and a set of analytic tools specifically designed to register sub-categorical distinctions, experiential textures, and normative gradations that conventional jurisprudential method rounds away before analysis begins. James Parker’s Acoustic Jurisprudence is instructive here because it attends seriously to the relationship between sound, law, and power. Similarly, microtonal jurisprudence is concerned with how legal reasoning itself operates as a tuning system, with the epistemological structure of legal categorisation rather than its acoustic objects.
The Discomfort Is Data
The viral appeal of Angine de Poitrine rests partly on a productive discomfort. The music may seem off-putting, or difficult to place, an unease that cannot be attributed to a wrong note because there is no, or rarely a wrong note (rather, there is a striking level of technical precision by guitarist, Khn), only unfamiliar intervals. The discomfort signals not error but expansion, whereby the ear is encountering a space it did not know the tuning system had been excluding.
Microtonal jurisprudence should cultivate an equivalent discomfort. Where legal doctrine produces outcomes that feel wrong but cannot be named as legally erroneous, a feeling that is not a failure of legal reasoning but a sign that the interval is too narrow. The lived experience that does not register is the data that a microtonal methodology is specifically designed to capture. This connects microtonal jurisprudence to a long lineage of critical legal thinking. What the microtonal frame seeks to add to this lineage is a new organisational metaphor and, crucially, a new self-consciousness about method, an explicit account of why the apparatus of legal reasoning produces these exclusions and what a modified instrument might allow us to hear instead.
Resolution Critique
Flying Microtonal Banana was subtitled by King Gizzard as “Explorations into Microtonal Tuning, Volume 1,” a designation that marks incompleteness as a feature, not a defect. The album does not resolve into standard tuning at the end but leaves the listener in the expanded tonal space it has opened. Microtonal jurisprudence shares this refusal of resolution. Legal systems, and to which I might add legal thinking, especially in the context of legal education, are under constant pressure to decide, to settle, to produce the determinate outcome that rule of law requires. That pressure is not always wrong. But it forecloses too early, and its foreclosures are asymmetrically distributed. For legal education in particular, this matters because a pedagogy that trains students only in the moves of standard tuning, such as how to identify the applicable rule, slot the facts into the category, and reach the determinate outcome, produces lawyers who are technically proficient but methodologically deaf to what the system cannot hear. A microtonal jurisprudence in the classroom would ask students to sit with the interval before resolving it, to name what the category cost before celebrating what it achieved.
A methodology that keeps the interval open, that sustains attention to what was lost in the move to determinacy, is not an enemy of legal order. It is, rather, a record of what that order cost. Microtonal jurisprudence listens to what law does as a tuning system, and therefore to the intervals it has decided not to divide, and to the lives that fall, unremarked, between them.
Robert Herian is Associate Professor of Law at University of Exeter | LinkedIn
I love this analysis, and I think it gets at something important about law’s capacity to think only “inside the box” of legal training. So many legal questions, and important human questions that come to law, cannot be answered from inside of that box. I’ve been working on this as a temporal question, but I’ve also written about law’s failures of listening, and what you’re doing here brings all that together. I hope you’ll publish more about it!
Thanks, Jill. In the longer draft piece from which this comes I deal with questions of time as an additional axis to law’s tuning as spatial, mainly via the music/(Deleuzian inspired) philosophy of Richard Pinhas – this is somewhat outside the microtonal metaphor, so may not make the final cut.
Thanks for this thought-provoking piece, which approaches law from musical/audial registers that I think can be instructive for critique and our understanding of legal practice.
Acknowledging that all metaphors have their limits, and without trying to stretch the microtonal to breaking point, I wonder whether the specific nature of the instruments you discuss lend themselves to an analysis focused on certainty and, by extension, law’s determinacy and formal limitations? I’m thinking of the glissando on string or wind instruments which seem precisely to operate across more historical and contemporary Western and non-Western musical traditions and which sometimes create precisely the kind of unmooring discomfort you describe as something mostly unavailable to the fret-bound guitar, say.
I also wonder about the political valence of discomfort and its potential to move beyond the constraints of formal law (having also attached to this as an ‘ethic’ in my own work). Again to use a musical example, a lot of Western music could be explained by how it seeks to account for ‘otherness’ – whether by exoticising it or otherwise but nonetheless incorporating it within its own terms. What is it about the microtonal, then, that would make a similar notion in jurisprudence more than the latest albeit ‘self-conscious’ innovation in a genre as opposed to something epistemologically other or open-ended? I guess this is the same as asking about the (potentially dependent, symbiotic) relationship between doctrine and critique, and whether the difference is the all-important reflection that doctrine lacks.
Thanks again for this insightful piece and looking forward to reading the longer version!
Thank you for this truly inspiring piece. This and the further comments drive me towards the idea that, as Sir Roger Penrose suggests, the physical world is somehow entangled with the mental world and the world of mathematical ideas. Perhaps, if reality is indeterminate at a fundamental level, the mental world can only make it intelligible by imposing a certain degree of determinacy upon it, though this necessarily comes at a cost.
I mean that conceptual categories in our language – a language that evolved, among other things, to convey very basic information necessary for survival – compress complex human experience into ‘boxes’. These are, if I may continue the musical metaphor, our standard intervals. They can provide a semblance of determinacy and objectivity necessary for law to perform its stabilising function, but this remains far from a fine-grained picture of complex reality, with many gradations left at the edge of legal audibility.
If we put aside this categorical language, seeking instead ‘glissando’ forms of expression and communication, we may become better able to register more subtle gradations and individual human experiences made inaudible between standard registers. Obviously, the difficulty is that the multiplicity of such experiences may make interpretation increasingly open-ended: the movement between particular experience and the conceptual whole can set the hermeneutic circle into potentially endless motion. Yet I do not think this puts the stabilising function of law at any greater risk than reliance on ‘standard registers’ does.
And we are back again to the ‘oscillation’ so well known in recent critical scholarship, and fidelity to this oscillation – perhaps itself a feature of our reality – may be precisely what microtonal jurisprudence and similar critical approaches seek to preserve. Anyway, thank you again for sharing your thoughts!