Andrew Dalke wrote:
Jan Dries
If you just want to play notes, you could look at MIDI.
[snip]
It's hard to compare that to the current era. Sound clips are much more common, it's easy to record audio, keyboards and other specialized devices are cheap, and there's plenty of mixer and recording software. Were I to have started now I would have taken a different course and perhaps one of these newer things would have interested me more.
The funny thing is, for me, MIDI is dead old. One of my first computers, back in 1986, was an Atari ST. It came equiped with a MIDI port. And the MIDI file format was created in those days, on Atari. The Atari also had a Yamaha YM2149 sound chip on it that one could mess with in the way you describe, and I did play with that too. But the cool thing about MIDI was that it came with additional stuff, such as multiple voices, and different timbres for different instruments. And I didn't have to bother with the attack-decay-sustain-release envelope in order to make my notes sound like notes instead of beeps. Playing with the sound chip was like assembler, while playing with MIDI was more like a higher level language. At the time I was a teenager and couldn't afford my own keyboard though, and the Atari didn't have a sufficiently sophisticated audio system for playback of MIDI files.
Back in 1995 my then girlfriend wrote a thesis on AI where she did an analysis of Rachmaninov's Ampico rolls in an attemt to try to extract characteristics from that that could be applied to any piece of music to make it sound more "human" than when played by a computer.
I helped her out by writing a "notes to MIDI" converter, to make the results of her work audible.
I seem to remember that even then we still had to rely on a keyboard or so to do the playback.
But nowadays even the cheapest PC comes with "multi-media" sound hardware, and playback of MIDI files is easy. And the nice thing for me to find out is that the good old file format from back in the days on Atari is still out there, and well supported by programs like Windows Media Player.
Frankly I share your sentiment and "these newer things" like sound clips, mixers, recording software and so have never managed to interested me either. But MIDI is not among those, at least not for me. Because of my particular background, MIDI has for about 20 years now been the "serious" way to playing notes. And in fact, to the best of my knowledge it is still the easiest way to get decent notes out of my PC. A while ago I bought a few software packages that enable one to enter notes and play them back. After trying out half a dozen of these, I ended rolling my own solution in just 400 lines of Python, plus a Python module to read/write MIDI files.
Regards, Jan
Just as a side note, I remember reading somewhere that the Casio WK3000 Keyboard uses Python. Not sure if that's internal or just for Casio's own development.
-- Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://mypage.uniserve.com/~bvdp
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