14 Dec
2002
14 Dec
'02
1:54 p.m.
On Saturday 14 December 2002 16.13, Steve Harris wrote:
Why design a plugin for one specific temperament of one scale, when
you could support a range of similar temperaments for that scale...?
Why worry about temperament at all, in every plugin of this kind?
This seems to me like a totally backwards way of implementing note
based theory.
The order is irrelevant.
Yes, if every plugin is aware of the exact temperament of the scale.
On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 03:35:41 +0100, David Olofson
wrote:
Well you will almost allways use a external device -> pitch
converter, so you cant get it into the wrong order. Anyone whos
capable of comosing in more that one scale at once is alos capable
of placing a few modules.
I don't get it. If you're supposed to place the scale converter
*first*, then how are you supposed to be able to apply anything like
traditional music theory, rather than pure, continous pitch based
theory? You will have to know the *exact* temperament of the scale
(to decode the input, and to generate output in the same scale), even
if you're only worried about notes.
Er, well,
most people will just let the host do the wiring for
them. So it will all work fine.
...as long as they put the plugins in the right order. Running linear
pitch with a scale applied into a plugin that
expects <something>/note is not a mismatch? So, how is that
plugin going to figure out what pitch in the input corresponds to
which note in the scale?
No plugins expect something per note. All of the expect to receive
pitch, if ther are designed for ET they can calculate the note fomr
the pitch trivially. You have to tell them what scale youre using
(or they could be 12tET only). It wont need explaining, its blatatly obvious, unlike
if you
have pitch and note pitch when its not obvious if they will be
compatible or not (even to the host).
I don't see how it's blatantly obvious that things will work if
you put the plugins in one order, whereas it will not work at all
if you put them in some other order. Realisticly you only need to convert from notes to
pitch at the
input stage, once it in the system you will be fine just processing
the pitch data.
Yes, but only if you work only with continous pitch based theory, or
ET scales only.
If you really, really want to convert from one source
of note
numbering to two seperate scales you do the equivalent function
with pitch mappers (we discussed this a few days back, I think you
agreed that it was easier to do the processing on pitch data,
rather than skewed scales anyway).
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about doing any
musically interesting processing at all, while playing the result
with a non-ET scale. It has nothing to do with whether you're using
one scale, or multiple scales.
Any modules that want to do note based processing for
ET scales can
do it just by being told now many notes per octave there are (just
like with note representations) and note based processing for
non-ET scales is still hard, but probably not neccesary.
Well, that might be for *very* non-ET scales. However, I suspect that
*subtly* different temperaments of the 12t scale used in some
classical music are a lot more interesting to people in general -
especially those who would ever think about using any event
processors based on traditional theory.
I'm not
away of any non-ET scale where you could, eg. arpegiate without
knowing a lot more than just the number of the note in the scale.
So, if you're playing a keyboard instrument, you have to play
different notes if you're using a slightly different temperament than
you would if the instrument was tuned to 12tET?
Well, the scales that were used for keyboard instruments before the
ET scale became popular (thanks to Bach) aren't very useful if you
get too far from the intended key signature. Is that reason enough to
dismiss them as non-existent? Indeed, they're hardly ever used these
days - but OTOH, nor is Mercator's 53tET scale, which is as close to
perfect you get with ET, without using hundreds of tones/octave.
That said, it's easy enough to change the tuning of synths, even
dynamically, so I'm still not convinced that working with an
approximat 12t scale, and then converting to the right temperament,
is useless and irrelevant.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
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