17 Dec
2002
17 Dec
'02
10:32 a.m.
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