[linux-audio-dev] XAP: a polemic

[Tim Goetze]

Tim Hockin wrote:

>Good god!  I come home and find not 10, not 20 but SIXTY emails arguing the
>virtues of time, precision of floating point values, and at least one
>exposition on Indian rhythm.
>
>It's going to take me a while to catch up - Anyone care to summarize?

i'll try to. much of the recent time discussion revolves around
the fact that musical time on a computer can be organized with
float numbers, ie. you have integral 4/4 time, 7/8 time etc, 
but you may also want, say, 9.5 counts to one cycle, to name one 
of the simpler cases of non-integral counts. 

the very valid reason you may want to use floats to describe
both numerator and denominator of course is universality -- you
certainly can imagine any kind of organizing musical time, and
you may want to use the computer to aid you in writing a piece
that makes use of it. 

the very pragmatic reason you do not want to use floats is 
that generic float n/d pairs summon a number of subtle pitfalls
that endanger precision when doing arithmetics in/on musical 
time. also, non-integral cycle counts are very uncommon in 
musical practice, and those you do come across will usually be 
good candidates for integer substitution (9.5 = 19 / 2). 

tim