Scordablature
Graham Breed
"scordatura". It's really a bit of both: scordablature.
The point is:
- Tuning table applied to a conventional keyboard
- Notation that tells you what keys to press as if you kept
the standard tuning
The motivation is that you can give the score to keyboard
players and not have to teach them to read a new notation.
This is important if you want to get a professional
quality performance because that tends to require a
professional performer. As an extension, you can work with
MIDI files that think they're in equal temperament.
I've got it working with my Tripod Notation code in
Lilypond now. It works better than I thought was
possible. I've written functions that can convert from one
pitch representation to another, even if they have
different numbers of steps to the octave. Well, that
doesn't sound like much, but I didn't think it was possible
last week, so there.
As a result the MIDI output works as scordablature instead
of giving the true pitches with pitch bends. This is very
nice because it means you can write a piece in LilyPond,
export it to MIDI, and move the notes around in a sequencer
so that they sound better. If you do this with a
pitch-bent file (pending the great, microtonally aware
sequencer) the pitch bends will tend to get out of sync
with the note-ons. (Rosegarden doesn't even preserve the
order of events in the file, so that the pitch bend of zero
at the end of one note can come after the pitch bend
attached to the next note.) And, for some of us, playing
the music in from the score is a difficult operation so
it's nice to have something there start with.
I tried doing a round trip from Tripod notation to MIDI to
Rosegarden to LilyPond and back to MIDI. There are some
quirks in Rosegarden that I had to work around, and that
may be fixed in later versions. But the score is
essentially what I started with. And I don't think there's
anything special about Tripod Notation that made it easier.
(The keyboard mapping I chose has the convenient property
that it has a repeating pattern of notes every octave.)
Now is the time for anybody who wants a score from a
scordablature MIDI file to send me that file and
instructions.
There are some imperfections. I assume the outputs for
different tracks have different octave transpositions, but
I can't specify it in the score. And enharmonic
equivalents are a bit arbitrary. If a pitch in one
notation can have more than one equivalent in the other you
might not end up with what you want, the same as with any
MIDI to score converter. There are workarounds for this
involving matching up enharmonic spellings but they get
ugly.
All the LilyPond and MIDI files I was working with are
undocumented additions to my Tripod source bundle:
http://x31eq.com/magic/tripod-code.zip
Graham