Finally!

Over a thousand years of Arabic maqām intonation at your fingertips

Tanghīm is a free, open-source MIDI plugin that brings historical and modern Arabic maqām tunings from the Digital Arabic Maqām Archive directly to any DAW

Download

Credits & licence

Tanghīm was conceived and designed byKhyam Allami at the Music Intelligence Lab / Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, 2026. It is free and open source, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

From the 9th Century to your DAW

Manuscripts of maqām theory revived.

The intonation of Arabic maqām has always been led by our ears, but it has also been theorised and measured by many great minds over the centuries.

al-Mawṣilī, al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīna, al-Urmawī, Mikhā'īl Meshshāqa, the Cairo Congress Tuning Committees, Amīn al-Dīk, Tawfīq al-Ṣabbāgh and many more…

Thanks to the data provided by the Digital Arabic Maqām Archive (DiArMaqAr), all of these systems can now be accessed and modified through Tanghīm in just a couple of clicks.

What is the Digital Arabic Maqām Archive?

Tanghīm draws its data from the Digital Arabic Maqām Archive (DiArMaqAr), an open-source repository of historically documented tuning systems and maqāmāt of the Arabic-speaking region, each with full bibliographic attribution.

Tanghīm queries DiArMaqAr's REST API and caches the data locally, so the maqāmāt and tunings you play are the same as the archive holds. An update button tells you when the archive has changed.

DiArMaqAr was researched, designed, and developed by Khyam Allami with Ibrahim El Khansa at the Music Intelligence Lab/Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences, American University of Beirut, Lebanon in 2026.

Arabic maqām tuning, your sounds

Three tuning methods, from software synths to hardware.

Tanghīm provides three methods to apply Arabic maqām tuning to your instruments. MTS-ESP retunes compatible synths automatically and immediately from the main transmitter plugin over shared memory.

For non-MTS-ESP enabled instruments, a dedicated receiver plugin enables per-note pitch bend using MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression), or Monophonic Pitch Bend for single-MIDI-channel synths.

MTS-ESPMPEMono PB

What is MTS-ESP?

MTS-ESP is a tuning protocol developed by ODDSound. One transmitter plugin sets the tuning, and any number of compatible instruments connect to it automatically, retuning together with no manual setup. The tuning updates in real time, so a change of maqām or transposition is transmitted to every connected instrument. It also allows multiple receiver plugins to share the same real-time change with non-MTS-ESP software and hardware instruments

Edit with your ears and play

Theoretical tuning data, in practice

Twelve sliders, one per chromatic step, provide a simple and immediate way to explore the tunings. Each slider includes snap markers to explore the different intervals, whilst letting you adjust any note by ear.

What is the difference between tanghīm and "tasyīk" or "tashrīq"?

Since the first digital Arabic keyboards of the 1980s, to this day, musicians of the Arabic-speaking region have relied on what is known locally as tashrīq or tasyīk: shifting a note from its natural tuning to a "quarter-tone" tuning, that is, lowering it by 50 cents. The process is called tasyīk or tashrīq in the sense of making the note a sīkāh, the Persian-Arabic-Ottoman name for the "quarter-tone" in Arabic maqām theory, or making it an "Eastern" note (sharqīya).

But the tuning of Arabic maqām does not rest only on placing a sīkāh within a scale of equal-tempered notes; it rests on the full intonation that gives every note its precise ratio. The choice of tasyīk or tashrīq, to change the tuning of a single note only, came from the practical need to save time and effort, changing one note instead of many, at the cost of proper maqām intonation.

Today, Tanghīm offers a fast, practical, precise, and faithful solution for the resonance of the music of the Arabic-speaking region. With the freedom to adjust any note by ear to taste and to save presets, so that choosing any maqām, or modulating from it, is just a click away.

Choose your maqām then modulate

MIDI-mappable and automatable presets.

Save up to eight presets of any maqām, in any available transposition, in any tuning, and switch between them by MIDI-mapping your controller, sending Program Change messages, or using DAW automation.

Dīwānayn from Yegāh to Saham

Expand to full width for a two-octave view.

Widen the plugin and the slider bank grows with it, laying out the tuning system across the two dawāwīn, the lower and upper octave registers of Arabic maqām theory. Every degree is visible at once, with its note names and solfège so you can see the whole system.

What is the Diwān of Arabic maqām theory?

Arabic maqām theory gives unique Persian-Arab-Ottoman names for each of its notes (rāst, dūgāh, sīkāh, and so on) across two دواوين (dawāwīn), a lower and an upper dīwān (octave). Expand Tanghīm to its full width to see the tuning systems and maqāmāt across the two octaves.

Hear it instantly

Audition any tuning with no instrument loaded.

The built-in triangle-wave oscillator (Osc) lets you hear a tuning immediately, with no external instrument loaded, so you can explore a maqām the moment you select it.

Osc

Heptatonic mode for quick play

Heptatonic mode (Hept) remaps the keyboard so every maqām is performable on the diatonic (white) keys alone starting from its associated tonic. Any maqām becomes easy to hear and play, with no complex fingerings to learn.

Set your reference pitch

Set the tuning's reference pitch by ear, exact Hz, or cents to match your favourite recordings or your taste. The reference retains across maqāmāt and tuning systems, so you can set it and forget it.

Save and load your maqām tunings

Edit, save, and reload your maqām tunings and presets as human-readable .Tanghīm files including the reference pitch and per-note overrides across different octaves.

Grab and process the MIDI notes

Drag the current maqām's MIDI notes out as a standard MIDI file, onto your timeline, or as a clip to feed arpeggiators and other MIDI processors. A Program Change is embedded so the preset re-arms on playback.

A practical maqām tuning method for Ableton Live

Ableton Live doesn't allow third-party MIDI-effect plug-ins. To solve this, Tanghīm ships with two Max for Live devices (an MPE Receiver and a Mono Pitch Bend Receiver) that deliver the tuning inside Live. No extra configuration, just install, load, and the tuning follows.

Ableton Live setup guide →

On the name

Tanghīm is an Arabic maṣdar, or verbal noun, denoting the act of intoning or setting pitch. In linguistics it is the standard equivalent of intonation, the melodic contour of speech.

Here it names intonational tuning (the pitch relationships that make up a system) as distinct from the Arabic usage of دوزان (dūzān) for the mechanical tuning of an instrument's strings. Dūzān is a borrowing from Ottoman Turkish düzen (“order, arrangement, tuning”), from the verb düzmek (“to arrange, put in order”).

Free, open-source, and ready for your music.

Read the docs