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Hi everyone, esp D. Michael McIntyre, Vegar Johannes Hatlevik and
Julie S (and Dougie of course)
Thanks for being encouraging about the microtonal and pitchtracker
stuff. We're still using it a lot, and in fact we have a new team
member, Ben, who's working with Dougie's code. We're going to be
using it for Graham Hair's microtonal works for a while now, doing a
bit of empirical performance analysis. We've got a couple of sopranos
who have been trained up on it, and there's a video of one of the 19-
ET songs on-line now here:
http://www.n-ism.org/People/graham.php#microtonal
(click the Play Video link under the picture: 61 seconds. You'll need
Java.).
This does raise the question as to how this work should be
distributed. At the moment, we have a patch against a very old RG
version. We're really waiting for KDE4 to happen before doing any
major maintenance at the CMT, bug Dougie will easily beat us to a
release if he puts his mind to it! The point is that the pitch
tracker is likely to be of minority interest to the RG user
community, but it isn't that big, so I'd've thought it would be a
nice toy they wouldn't complain about if it didn't destabilise the
application. It does add fftw as a dependency though. The microtonal
aspect is entirely optional, of course, you can use it with 12ET. You
can't even do 12-note tonal music in MIDI as you know, because
different notes like F# and Gb are given the same note number (and
it's only keyboard players believe they really are the same note! --
don't start me off on that...) Although Dougie added (three)?quarter-
sharp and (three)?quarter-flat symbols to the notation editor, we
don't use them for 19ET (where the three intervals between the
different notes F, F#, Gb and G are equal). Check out the
hyperchromatic scale on the keyboard and the figures in the voice
part at the end of the song to see that in action. we always tried to
respect the developers' wishes "not to add anything that would make
MIDI rendering more difficult", because that is of course the primary
function of RG. In any case, any think like MIDI which (in most
realisations) ignores the middle transformation in
Note name => temperament mapping => frequency
can't ever really render microtonal stuff flexibly anyway. Yes, we
know about MIDI tuning standards. Hardly anybody uses them!
Fortuantely, FluidSynth does, so for training purposes we use that as
a MIDI renderer. We end up writing two versions of the score in RG:
one to look at, and a "scordatura" one. See for example
http://www.n-ism.org/Papers/Microtonalism/john_bull.pdf
You hear the top two lines, but play the bottom two on a retuned-MIDI
synthesiser. Different tunings sound wildly different, and nobody
really knows which temperament was in use when it was composed.
http://www.n-ism.org/audio.php?file=John_Bull%2ftemperaments
I don't think anybody, including us, would want to change RG so much
that it can natively cope with all these different issues. But maybe
I'm wrong!
So, distribution. Currently, there's an old live CD on the microtonal
n-ism page,
http://www.n-ism.org/Projects/microtonalism.php
but it's a hive of bugs. In future, there are probably three options.
1. Do nothing; we or Dougie just put a patch on our web site.
2. We wrap a compile-time switch so people downloading the RG source
can choose whether or not they want the Pitch Tracker functionality.
3. We work with the developers very closely to make the whole thing
entirely mainstream.
I have no axe to grind. I just want to use RG for training purposes
at music conservatoria and to acquire data to study performance
practice. That means the pitch tracker, the ability to represent
arbitrary temperaments, and, coming soon(ish), the ability to act as
a database client for acquired performance information. But it seems
against the open source spirit at least not to try and give the
software back to the main user group in some way.
Nick/.
References:
On 28 Oct 2008, at 11:35 am, Dougie McGilvray wrote:
>
> The conversion would have to come from within RG because to map
> from one
> tuning to the other requires MIDI + accidental. I have code which will
> map between pitch, MIDI & frequency - and it has a flexible format for
> defining tuning systems. I just need to pull my finger out.
> Actually, I
> haven't done any coding for ages so maybe I'll make that my next task.
> I'll keep you all posted
>
> Dougie
>
> Julie S wrote:
>> Hello Dougie,
>>
>> The microtonal stuff sounds great. It would be nice to get that
>> up and going.
>>
>> It sounds like at great addition to what everyone was scratching
>> their head over to be the big "reason" to switch to the new port
>> of Rosegarden. I'll leave it at that and see what Chris, Michael,
>> etc. think about that idea.
>>
>> I know that doesn't help the original poster and their issue
>> directly though. For converting, RG Midi to microtonal, there
>> might be a MIDI mapper out there to help, but I didn't find a
>> flexible one out there, yet. I'll look some more today or
>> tomorrow and get back to this topic, if I find anything.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Julie S.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> _______________________________________
> Douglas McGilvray
>
> Lecturer in Audio Technology
> School of Engineering and Computing
> Glasgow Caledonian University
> Cowcaddens Road
> Glasgow
> G4 0BA
> Scotland, UK
> http://www.gcal.ac.uk/sec/
> _______________________________________
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> Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity,
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