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I know that canonically some Western instruments from the Baroque through High Classical era have been listed as being present in Avistan, and that a few threads have popped up about music on Golarion every so often (like this one and this one), but has anything more detailed come up on this? (And searching for microtonal music on these messageboards brought up exactly 1 hit, and it is not viewable.)
Golarion has working magic, which should enable the development of arcanaphones, which would be Golarion's equivalent of synthesizers, but using magic instead of electricity to generate sound. Given the existence of fairly low-level magic for making convincing sounds of things that aren't really there, the cost of such instruments should be only moderately outrageous -- out of reach of most of the common people, but easily in reach for the nobility and upper merchant classes.
And it is not just the instruments that I am interested in, but also the music systems -- like how on Earth, Western music has been dominated by systems of 12 notes per octave (although exceptions exist, going back into the late Renaissance), while cultures elsewhere have their own systems of not necessarily 12 notes per octave (although I must admit to at best passing familiarity with these).
Environments commonly used on Golarion but not commonly used on Earth would be expected to have an influence on music-making. For instance, those living underground and having easy access to stone and metal but not to wood or most other organics could find themselves pushed in the direction of making instruments of the idiophone families, consisting of struck bars or rods, which would have highly inharmonic partials, thereby causing effective harmonic relations between notes to be different from those produced by stringed, woodwind, and brass instruments; yet they would also be able to make brass instruments and even metal "woodwind" instruents, both of which would tend to have more conventional harmonics. And they just might want an arcanaphone (see above) to glue it all together. And if they had short fingers, it would tend to drive them to develop keyboards of layout radically different from the Halberstadt (piano/harpsichord/organ-style) keyboard familiar to us; such radically different keyboards started to appear at least as early as the 1800s on Earth, so their development on Golarion would not be completely unexpected).
I got interested in this subject from stumbling upon microtonal music on YouTube, which has seen a recent great radiation of microtonal music that actually sounds good (apparently largely driven by the evolution of somewhat affordable isomorphic/generalized electronic keyboards and software synthesizers of good quality, although acoustic instrumental music of this type also exists, and indeed is common in parts of Earth outside the Western world). And then the Xenharmonic Wiki has been a great resource -- even if fairly rough around the edges -- for learning the mathematical details of music, even if some of it does seem to require a degree from a college of magic in mathematics. Even i I never produce any music (microtonal or otherwise) myself, it has been a wild ride in learning what it is that makes our dominant Western system of 12 equally tempered notes per octave actually work.
I'm not a musicial, but at least as a headcanon I like the idea that something like rock is getting its first toehold on Golarion in Absalom, where so many cultural influences meet and mingle, where instruments from different cultures combine to create new sounds, combined with Absaloms spirit of identity reinvention, and from there will spread across the Inner Sea. Dwarf folk rockers adapting traditional songs to modern instrumentalities and modes, elves evolving a more symphonic rock, halflings turnking to early punk, and so on, adding their musical innovations to the cultural melting pot of the city.
^I could see that happening leading up to the time of Starfinder.
^ . . . And Absalom Station's culture should reflect the aftereffects of that, even if the Gap makes it seem at best like hazy memories from some wild party . . . .
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Shadow Malice, the Darklands punk band from Abomination Vaults, absolutely plays rock music.
So would any musician from the Plane of Earth, if you get me.
Plugging ttornikoski's symphony.
Cool -- I didn't know we had composers around here. We need more!
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Music with Rocks in! Be there or be a rectangular thingie!
Also worth paying attention to some videos that YouTube has been recommending to me of recreations of ancient Greek instruments and music, such as this one, so that Iblydos can get some love too.
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I'm sure this is straight from the Five Kings Mountains Dwarven Forge
^Nice fit with Dwarven culture that we've heard of. But would Dwarves be content to stick with 12 notes per octave? On Earth, once you get outside the West, several Human cultures DON'T content themselves to stick with 12 notes per octave, with some going to considerably more. And for Dwarves, what are you mining all that precious metal for if you aren't going to use some of that wealth to make a pipe organ that has 50 ranks AND 50 notes per octave?