my MMM Day contribution

Better late than never! Perhaps it's still the 8th somewhere, what
with the international date line and all.

http://lumma.org/music/SunnyShores1.mp3
http://lumma.org/music/SunnyShores2.mp3

Sunny Shores is a 2-part piece I wrote on manuscript in 1997. It was
originally conceived in 12-tET. I used the following method to perform
it microtonally...

Music was entered into Encore (www.gvox.com) with a mouse and saved as
MIDI. The resulting file for part 2 was then "humanized" slightly with
Gunter Nagler's free MIDIHUM tool, to make chord attacks less annoying.
Both performances can still safely be described as lifeless.

Scala was used to retune the files with pitch bends in about two dozen
different 12-note scales from my scale library, using the following
batch command (in Windows XP)...

FOR %%B IN (*.scl) DO scala %%B --example/midi %1 %%~nB_%1 --exit

I also retuned part 2 in a number of ways with John deLaubenfels' BGE
adaptive retuning program (www.adaptune.com).

The results were auditioned in Winamp.

John's 7-limit adaptive tuning sounded best for part 2, but the MIDI
file had some pitch-bendy glitches (in Winamp, anyway), so I decided
against it. And none of the fixed scales I tried really worked, so I
made one up based on what I'd heard, and by looking at the score. The
piece ignores the syntonic comma, so I used meantone as a backbone.
Turned out it was possible to bring the septimal intervals up front
without having the wolf occur at all. From the auditioning I'd done, I
knew I wanted an 11/8 tritone, so I put it in...

!
Empirically-derived scale for "Sunny Shores part 2", Carl Lumma, 2006.
12
!
79.
194.
273.
388.
503.
551.
697.
791.
891.
970.
1085.
1200.
!
! 697-cent meantone (Bb-F wolf) with 11/8 and 30/19.

Part 1 is tuned in the 12-tone MOS of the 7-limit TOP augmented
temperament, as given by Paul Erlich (but with values rounded to the
nearest cent).

Offsets from 12-tET for these scales were calculated in Excel and
entered into Audio Compositor. Music was rendered to CD-quality WAV
using Philippe Guillaume's version of Trachtman's 'Steinway C' soundfont
(www.hammersound.net), normalized in Adobe Audition, encoded to MP3 with
LAME (.sourceforge.net), normalized with mp3gain (.sourceforge.net), and
tagged with Winamp.

Whew!

-Carl

On, Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Carl Lumma wrote:
>
> Better late than never! Perhaps it's still the 8th somewhere, what
> with the international date line and all.
>
> http://lumma.org/music/SunnyShores1.mp3
> http://lumma.org/music/SunnyShores2.mp3
>
> Sunny Shores is a 2-part piece I wrote on manuscript in 1997. It was
> originally conceived in 12-tET. I used the following method to perform
> it microtonally...
>
> Music was entered into Encore (www.gvox.com) with a mouse and saved as
> MIDI. The resulting file for part 2 was then "humanized" slightly with
> Gunter Nagler's free MIDIHUM tool, to make chord attacks less annoying.
> Both performances can still safely be described as lifeless.
>
> Scala was used to retune the files with pitch bends in about two dozen
> different 12-note scales from my scale library, using the following
> batch command (in Windows XP)...
>
> FOR %%B IN (*.scl) DO scala %%B --example/midi %1 %%~nB_%1 --exit
>
> I also retuned part 2 in a number of ways with John deLaubenfels' BGE
> adaptive retuning program (www.adaptune.com).
>
> The results were auditioned in Winamp.
>
> John's 7-limit adaptive tuning sounded best for part 2, but the MIDI
> file had some pitch-bendy glitches (in Winamp, anyway), so I decided
> against it. And none of the fixed scales I tried really worked, so I
> made one up based on what I'd heard, and by looking at the score. The
> piece ignores the syntonic comma, so I used meantone as a backbone.
> Turned out it was possible to bring the septimal intervals up front
> without having the wolf occur at all. From the auditioning I'd done, I
> knew I wanted an 11/8 tritone, so I put it in...
>
> !
> Empirically-derived scale for "Sunny Shores part 2", Carl Lumma, 2006.
> 12
> !
> 79.
> 194.
> 273.
> 388.
> 503.
> 551.
> 697.
> 791.
> 891.
> 970.
> 1085.
> 1200.
> !
> ! 697-cent meantone (Bb-F wolf) with 11/8 and 30/19.
>
> Part 1 is tuned in the 12-tone MOS of the 7-limit TOP augmented
> temperament, as given by Paul Erlich (but with values rounded to the
> nearest cent).
>
> Offsets from 12-tET for these scales were calculated in Excel and
> entered into Audio Compositor. Music was rendered to CD-quality WAV
> using Philippe Guillaume's version of Trachtman's 'Steinway C' soundfont
> (www.hammersound.net), normalized in Adobe Audition, encoded to MP3 with
> LAME (.sourceforge.net), normalized with mp3gain (.sourceforge.net), and
> tagged with Winamp.
>
> Whew!

Carl,

Whew! indeed .... !!! This sounds like a whole lotta work.
So why is that people say that musicians "play" music ... 8-o ?!

Tell me now --- how does a Windows XP batch command
differ from a DOS batch command? ( I wrote heaps of
those, way back when, for automating tasks.)

Perhaps we can give Jon L Smith a nice wrapper for that
command-line program he's afraid to try out? And I'd
really, really miss him if he went the "exsanguination"
path ...

Regards,
Yahya

--
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>Tell me now --- how does a Windows XP batch command
>differ from a DOS batch command? ( I wrote heaps of
>those, way back when, for automating tasks.)

They're similar, but the NT shell has slightly different
syntax (and a completely different command interpreter)
than DOS did.

>Perhaps we can give Jon L Smith a nice wrapper for that
>command-line program he's afraid to try out? And I'd
>really, really miss him if he went the "exsanguination"
>path ...

You lost me here...

-C.