On the regular
diatonically tuned qanun,
mandal technology was first implemented, according to Turkish musicologist
Rauf Yekta, some 30 years prior to his submission of his invited monograph on Turkish Music to the 1922 edition of Albert Lavignac's
Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire. Levantine qanuns, prior to that time, remained rather inflexible and cumbersome to perform on (especially as demanding modulations/transpositions came into vogue that were increasingly emulating Western
tonality and
key changes), requiring the player to use the fingernail of the thumb to depress on the leftmost ends of the courses to achieve on-the-fly intervallic alterations. With the advent of
electronic tuners some decades later, standardization of the placement of
reference mandals on the qanun began. While Armenian kanuns now employ only equidistant
half-tones and Arabic qanuns exact
quarter-tones as a result, Turkish kanun-makers went so far as dividing the electroacoustically referenced
equal-tempered semitone of 100 cents into 6 equal parts, yielding – for all intents and purposes – 72 equal divisions (or
commas) of the
octave pitch resolution. Not all pitches of
72-tone equal temperament are available on the Turkish kanun, however, since kanun-makers affix mandals that only accommodate modulations/transpositions popularly demanded by performers. This has subsequently led to the familiar interrupted and irregular pattern of mandals on the Turkish kanun becoming a visual guide for players, in facilitating modal and intonational navigation on an instrument which is ordinarily bereft of pitch markers. Some kanun-makers may also choose to divide the semitone distance from the nut of the lower registers into 7 parts instead for microtonal subtlety (and the highest registers, conversely, into 5 parts due to spacing constraints); but do so at the expense of
octave equivalences. Despite the mentioned discrepancies, hundreds of mandal configurations are at the player's disposal when performing on an ordinary Turkish kanun. On the other hand, the nowadays widespread application of equidistant 24-tones on Arabic and 72-tones on Turkish qanun models presents an ongoing source of controversy. This is particularly in regards to how adequate such
Eurocentric octave divisions are in faithfully reproducing the traditionally or classically understood fluid pitches and inflexions of
Arabic music or
Ottoman classical music scales. Pitch measurement analyses of relevant audio recordings reveal that, equal temperaments based on bike-chained "multiples of twelve" are essentially not compatible with authentic Middle Eastern performances; substantiating the notion instruments strictly based on them would clash audibly with a justly tuned/intoned
tanbur,
oud,
ney, or
kemenche. Alternate tuning approaches for the qanun thus also exist. Turkish music theorist Ozan Yarman has proposed, for example, an academical 79-tone temperament for the expression within tolerable error-margins of
Maqamat /
Makamlar /
Dastgaha at all pitch levels, that was implemented by the renowned late
luthier Ejder Güleç (1939–2014) on a Turkish kanun. Likewise, the late Swiss-French qānūn performer Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss (1953–2015), who was critical of the tuning deficiency of Eurocentric octave divisions in approximating
just intervals, is known to have conceived, since 1990, a number of prototypes that were entirely based on low
prime-limit or simple integer ratio
Pythagorean and
harmonic intervals; which were once again built, on instructions from Weiss, by Ejder Güleç. ==Notable players==