> By the way -- as far as microtonal and xentonal and "world music scales" > are concerned, MIDI's pitch bends are an awkward hack. Serious > *microtonal* algocompsynth practitioners either have to spend time > working around MIDI or use something else.
I'm just a dilettante, not a musician. But once upon a time MIDI specifications formed my spare-time reading. The problem with using MIDI to express music is that the fundamental MIDI "atoms" are 'notes' (each representing a frequency). Thus in MIDI the sounds that occur need to be expressed as a series of 'notes'. This corresponds well with certain "Western" music that uses uniform "proportional frequency scales" (e.g, octaves) subdivided into 'notes' (e.g., the 12-tone system). If a sound does not fit the MIDI-assigned frequency of the nearest 'note', 'pitch bend' can be used to adjust that instance of the 'note' to the frequency desired. What I seem to recall was that the MIDI "tuning standard" (in conjunction with the "instrument" definition supplied to the MIDI-player) permitted the definition of a specific 'note-number' as __the__ "pivot frequency", with higher-numbered and lower-numbered 'note-numbers' being defined explicitly at proportional frequencies lower and higher than the "pivot frequency". As long as the 100+ possible 'note-numbers' (plus 'pitch bend') were enough to cover the frequency range of the musical composition, this MIDI notation would suffice to *express* that musical composition (even for "world music scales"). [Of course, if the __MIDI-player__ did not support this "pivot frequency" mechanism, the wrong sounds would be produced.] [Also, there is an __Organ__ project which uses SYSEX messages to define "custom" sounds, then uses MIDI-events to play them.] mikus _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel