Nicholas Bailey wrote:
> I was unaware of scala, which looks very interesting indeed, so I've 
> forwarded that link to the composer: 
> http://www.gla.ac.uk/music/staff/Graham.html.

One thing I should have mentioned is that Scala is closed source.
Unfortunately I do not know of any similarly capable open-source tool.

> The particular functionality which is required is therefore directed
> at musicians who will already have an acutely accurate sense of pitch,
> but will be benefit from having a "recording" of pitch-against-time
> so they can get the hang of the piece at a phrase level.

I wonder whether, in addition to your plan to provide special accidentals
for the notation editor, you might consider also extending
RG's matrix editor (a graph-based layout of notes) to support
microtonal pitches.  I find RG's two main editors are both
useful in complementary ways.

> Other solutions we considered were using Niffty, another sf project, 

BTW, you should ignore the claim on the Niffty project webpage
that Rosegarden is written in C and being ported to Gnome.
RG is written in C++ for the Qt library (wwww.trolltech.com/qt)

> The quarter-tone annotation really should be in the core if you ask me, 
> but I guess we are coming at the program with a viewpoint considerably 
> different from most of the user community, who might well be better at 
> home with a more commercial culture (I m searching for but refusing to 
> use terms like "Popular music", "Serious music" etc because I don't 
> know any which aren't loaded with unintended and politically incorrect 
> overtones -- but you know what I mean).

Maybe. I would guess there are more than a few RG users with quite high levels
of compositional and analytical skills in "serious music".

> I suppose if people find the pitch-tracking useful, it could become a
> compile-time option? 
> (./configure --with-pitch-tracker). That's really up to you guys.

It's not up to me but I'd prefer any such microtonal functionality
to be included by default.

>> Why stop at rational numbers when you could go for real-valued 
>> frequency stored in a double?
> 
> Quite right! The only reason, perhaps, being careful about how one 
> tests for which accidental symbol to use in the more esoteric systems, 
> doubles and equality testing being fraught with danger as we all know. 
> I think the advantages might outweigh the cons.

Yes, although in the case of floating-point quantities like doubles
one would presumably only apply inexact versions of the standard
arithmetic-operators so as to avoid the problems of truncation and
rounding errors.

>>> What is the right spelling of diatonically equivalent notes anyway?
>> Diatonically equivalent under which transformation(s)?
> 
> Right!
> I was just thinking of conventional, tonal, F#/Gb type equivalencies, 

You mean enharmonic spellings/variations, I think.

> but of course that's not too bad if you have the concept of a "key 
> signature". I should imagine a general microtonal system opens at lest 
> one large can or worms, which is why we'd welcome a discussion of the 
> internal representational issues.

I'm Chris will give you further references to the relevant C++ classes and
functions which you'd need to modify.

William


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop
FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools!
Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today.
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=4721&alloc_id=10040&op=click
_______________________________________________
Rosegarden-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel

Reply via email to