Mea culpa
Mike Battaglia
group. When it was first formed, I was completely new here, didn't
know anything about regular temperament theory, and was fighting with
lots of people. Times seem to have changed a bit.
What has unfortunately not changed is that this group never really got
off the ground. We at first couldn't decide on what we wanted to do -
notation editor, sequencer, etc. At this point, I think it would be
nice if we all did something. I don't care whether it's a notation
editor or a sequencer or anything.
So the point of this message is simply to convey that I'm willing to
still contribute some sweat equity to a group project here. I no
longer have strong feelings about what we do. If everyone still wants
to do a notation editor, fine, let's do that. It would be nice if some
day we could get on a sequencer, but if 4 years ago I would have known
the choices were "have a notation editor in 4 years" or "have nothing
in 4 years" I'd have picked the notation editor.
We're all pretty strapped for time, so it will probably be slow, but
it would be nice to at least have a sourceforge page and some kind of
a goal, even if it takes a year to complete the project.
Is anyone interested in starting something like this up again?
-Mike
Graham Breed
> Is anyone interested in starting something like this up again?
What I thought at the time is that the plans were too ambitious. What
I did that summer was investigate the LilyPond support for
microtonality and alternative notations, get demonstrations working,
add Sagittal support, and give feedback for the official documentation
of microtonal features.
I used all of that in the Tripod Notation PDF. You can get the source
code and a permanently unfinished article here:
I was already thinking of going back to that and adding support for
keyboard tablature. That is, scores that look normal, but show the
keys you press on a standard keyboard to get the right pitches with
tuning tables.
There are some other things that could be done:
- Check for other, slightly different ways of handling the
accidentals, and unify the code bases.
- Work through demos for the notation types we originally listed here.
- Write a tutorial on how to use what we already have.
- Find a LilyPond-based notation editor and get microtonal notations
working with it.
- Write a Midiconv-type processor to take a MIDI file with LilyPond's
pitch bends and convert them to MTS messages or map the pitches to use
tuning tables. (You could also try improving LilyPond's MIDI support,
but I think a stand-alone application is more promising. From what I
remember of Midiconv, it's not that difficult, and should be easier in
a higher level language like Python. But I still haven't done it :-p)
These should all be achievable short-term projects.
Graham
Mike Battaglia
> On 13 February 2011 03:35, Mike Battaglia <batta...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Is anyone interested in starting something like this up again?
>
> What I thought at the time is that the plans were too ambitious. What
> I did that summer was investigate the LilyPond support for
> microtonality and alternative notations, get demonstrations working,
> add Sagittal support, and give feedback for the official documentation
> of microtonal features.
I haven't played with LilyPond much, but something else people might
be interested in is this open-source HTML5 notation editor:
He's trying to come up with robust accidental support too:
http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/05/thing-about-accidentals.html
We could perhaps mix that with the MIDI engine I made here:
http://www.mikebattagliamusic.com/microscalegen/MIDIGenerator.html
Copy and paste a Scala file into that textbox (leave all of the
checkboxes ticked) and it'll play it. You can do chords as well by
doing something like {1/1, 5/4, 3/2}.
Maybe some of this could be worked in with Lilypond as well, although
I'm not sure exactly how.
-Mike
Chris Vaisvil
written in 12 intended for a micro tuned synth) and gave me a
microtonal score that made sense in some fashion.
Chris
Torsten Anders
What I am currently working on is to add microtonal support to Sibelius using its ManuScript language. I aim to have notation (i.e., special accidentals), playback, and some basic functions like transposition and enharmonic change implemented. Obviously, Sibelius offers a GUI that is more easy to use than Lilypond for editing music.
However, because of the design decisions in Sibelius, and the limitations of ManuScript, this support is only limited to a single tuning system at a time with a relatively small number of tones. In other words, extended JI would be very difficult to realise. I am currently implementing it for 31-TET, and may later generalise it so that the tuning system can be customised.
The reason for this restriction is that the Sibelius design (music representation) does not support arbitrary microtonal support internally (and the supported quartertones are not even accessible in ManuScript). What I am doing instead, is to encode certain tones with specific accumulated accidentals. For example, triple or quadruple sharp is used for representing certain enharmonic variants of my microtonal scale. The notation of such accumulated accidentals can be customised rather easily (via a special House Style), and this approach also supports importing microtonal music from other applications via MusicXML.
However, this approach also limits the reasonable total number of different tones and enharmonic variants per octave, because the data structure for storing the signs for accumulated accidentals is actually the one also used for other articulations etc. (e.g., if I remember correctly, the sevenfold sharp is the same as Bartok-pizzicato...). So, while this approach can likely be generalised for other tuning systems, it only works for tuning systems with a relatively small total number of different tones and enharmonic variants per octave.
If anyone of you is interested to collaborate, then I am happy to do so.
Best,
Torsten
PS: I only have Sibelius 5 (the ManuScript language was extended considerably for Sibelius 6, but I decided to better wait for Sibelius 7, even if that takes more than a further year).
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Graham Breed
> What I would love is a program that took my scordata midi files (music
> written in 12 intended for a micro tuned synth) and gave me a
> microtonal score that made sense in some fashion.
I think Rosegarden does MIDI to LilyPond conversion. At least, if you
can find a way of getting it into LilyPond all kinds of things are
possible.
Graham
Graham Breed
> I haven't played with LilyPond much, but something else people might
> be interested in is this open-source HTML5 notation editor:
>
> http://vexflow.com/
It doesn't seem to have a friendly input language yet, although he
suggested something similar to ABC. (Those who don't know jianpu are
doomed to reinvent it, badly.) You can't get MIDI files out of it.
Why is it something we should be worrying about?
Graham