@Aaron: Explaining my comment, "Since "microtonality" is more a phenomenon or quality than a genre or practice, you're likely to find resources scattered among topics. Microtonality in Turkish traditional music, in Norwegian hardinfele tunings, and in Bartok are very different conversations." ....

I guess I just meant the same thing you did above, that there isn't a "grand theory or common language." Microtonality is an aspect of many different musics, but for most of them, it's just one aspect of their overall approach to music. So while there might be a book titled "All About Microtonality: a Comprehensive Review of All the Places it Happens" (heh), it's more likely that the OP simply needs to dip into the studies of all the disparate musics that use it.

In fact, even the terminology betrays a certain cultural viewpoint. We call it "microtonality," meaning "anything that uses intervals smaller than the semitone that we focus on." While many other musics simply have other ways of constructing their frameworks.

So I guess your response was focused on "What do you mean, not a practice? Look at all the practical musics that incorporate it!" But I guess what I meant was just "It's rarely an end in itself—outside of some Western "art" practitioners that get excited about it—most musics for which it's an inherent and integral part don't consciously "do microtonality," they just do music.

thanks everyone!

@AndyBonner makes sense. It.

@AndyBonner makes sense. We are talking about the same thing. In most musical cultures, it’s not “microtonality”, it’s just the normal tuning practice

How do people feel about the audio tag: music.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/audio

@Dom I can see value in a tag that’s used for questions concerning software audio. But I’m not sure that it makes sense to group these with hardware audio; maybe the tag should be split up into separate tags for “software-audio” and “hardware-audio”.