I think anyone who has seen a piano can understand that the keys represent the familiar notes–A, B, C, etc–but musically the array of black and white actually represent a thing called semitones. Yet, there is a lot of sonic space between those semitone notes, and so half way between semitones come quarter-tones (unrepresented on a standard keyboard) and then when one moves at even smaller increments we really stop meaningfully measuring and call those spaces between the spaces microtones.

