In the late 1970s, Blackwood won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the harmonic and modal properties of microtonal tunings. The project culminated in the Microtonal Etudes, composed as illustrations of the tonal possibilities of all the equal tunings from 13 to 24 notes to the octave.
During the late 1970s, Blackwood received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the harmonic and modal properties of microtonal tuning systems. The outcome was the Microtonal Etudes, a collection of compositions illustrating the tonal possibilities of various tunings with 13 to 24 notes per octave.