Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic Subject: Re: 4-movement JI sonata

"Carl Lumma" wrote:

"Daniel Wolf has recently recommended Harmony Assistant, I believe..."

I keep trying out every notation program that comes out, looking for an optimal flexible, professional-quality notation program with microtonal notation AND immediate playback. At the moment, I would consider only Lime, Finale, and Harmony Assistant worthwhile. Sibelius and Turandot continue to promise more, but those promises are still vapor, and I would really like a decent program from the open source world, but haven't encountered it yet.

Lime can do the microtones directly, but is limited to its own fonts, and a tuning table with only 35 places (giving pitch bend values for seven nominals plus 28 accidentally-altered nominals. I don't know if you can use more than one table in a single notation file -- but it'd be worth finding out). The notated output is decent, but you're pretty much stuck with Lime's style book. On the plus side, the program is inexpensive.

I have written before that I think Harmony Assistant represents one of the ways notation and production packages will look in the future and it is very flexible. However, because the whole environment is radically different to other notation packages, I have not yet found my own working rhythm in HA. It achieves its flexiblity from writing "rules" which is a great idea, but I really do not want to do much programming at this point in my life, so it remains pretty much a toy.

So Finale is my workhorse. Many people are enthusiastic about Sibelius that I really would like to like it more, but the philosophy still seems to be that there is only one optimal way of doing anything and that's the Sibelius way, and you have to do it the way Sibelius wants you to do it. That means a very nice house style, but very little room to personalize it. That means a nice interface, but basically only one interface. In contrast Finale continues to try to serve every need, and is flexible in the extreme, if at the cost of being (or appearing to be) somewhat cumbersome to use, although some of the third party plug-ins make this much less so (TG Tools is the essential plug-in package). I like the fact that Finale lets me input via command-line text, midi keyboard, mouse clicks, or computer keyboard, working with fonts is easy, and I can do microtones in a number of ways. Mostly, I just set up a non-standard key signature (in Finale there is no fixed number of nominal or accidentals, but the accidentals have to have constant +/- scale step values), and do playback during my composing on my sound card's synth controlling the pitch bend with InTun, which has very low latency. If I need to render an audio file, I export a midi file, and render it directly with WAVMaker, or add pitchbend in Scala and render it elsewhere.

(In the long-term, the advantage of HA over Finale will be that the environment allows for the production of microtonal audio files directly from HA, rather than exporting midi files and rendering them in a separate program.)

DJW

🔗Carl Lumma <ekin@...>

>"Daniel Wolf has recently recommended Harmony Assistant, I believe..."
>
>I keep trying out every notation program that comes out, looking for an
>optimal flexible, professional-quality notation program with microtonal
>notation AND immediate playback.

Have you seen Notion?

>Lime can do the microtones directly, but is limited to its own fonts,

Lime does interactive playback? Last I checked (many years ago,
I admit), it was typesetting only. Or am I not remembering correctly?

>So Finale is my workhorse. Many people are enthusiastic about Sibelius
>that I really would like to like it more, but the philosophy still seems
>to be that there is only one optimal way of doing anything and that's
>the Sibelius way, and you have to do it the way Sibelius wants you to do
>it.

Exactly my experience!

>That means a very nice house style, but very little room to
>personalize it.

To be fair, isn't it possible to create one's own styles?

-Carl

🔗Rick McGowan <rick@...>

Daniel Wolf wrote,

> (In the long-term, the advantage of HA over Finale will be that the
> environment allows for the production of microtonal audio files directly
> from HA, rather than exporting midi files and rendering them in a
> separate program.)

Hmm, are you using a recent version? Finale 2006 with GPO can write
directly to WAV. Use "SaveSpecial -> Save As Audio File..." in the menu. It
plays back and writes the file in real-time. Also, if you're sending
output to GPO Studio, that can also save directly to WAV.

Rick

🔗threesixesinarow <CACCOLA@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Wolf <djwolf@...> wrote:

> I keep trying out every notation program that comes out, looking for
an
> optimal flexible, professional-quality notation program with
microtonal
> notation AND immediate playback. At the moment, I would consider
only
> Lime, Finale, and Harmony Assistant worthwhile. ...

> Lime can do the microtones directly, but is limited to its own
fonts,
> and a tuning table with only 35 places (giving pitch bend values for
> seven nominals plus 28 accidentally-altered nominals.

I made a couple examples using a sagittal font with Lime.

Clark

🔗c.m.bryan <chrismbryan@...>

🔗Daniel Wolf <djwolf@...>

I've got Fin 2005. The first method will work only if I do note-attached pitch bends (i.e. doing the pitch bending entirely within Finale instead of sending to a synth outside of Finale via InTun), and, AFAIK, this cannot be done in connection with the non-standard key signature. I don't have GPO studio. Can it be used as a real time synth? If so, then I guess that it would work, by sending to GPO via InTun.

DJW

Message 18
From: "Rick McGowan" rick@... wrote --

Rick

🔗threesixesinarow <CACCOLA@...>

🔗c.m.bryan <chrismbryan@...>

Cool. Very cool.

Has anyone implemented saggital in lilypond? That would be really
sweet... it just looks so freakin' awesome.

-chris

On 5/24/06, threesixesinarow <CACCOLA@...> wrote:
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, c.m.bryan <chrismbryan@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > > I made a couple examples using a sagittal font with Lime.
> >
> > Links? Attachments? Show us the goods!
>
> /makemicromusic/files/keyboard/
> tnupleft.GIF
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

--
"... free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen
to the point that no one can hear you." -Naomi Klein

🔗Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...>

Hi Clark, and all,

From: "threesixesinarow" on Wed May 24, 2006:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, c.m.bryan <chrismbryan@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > > I made a couple examples using a sagittal font with Lime.
> >
> > Links? Attachments? Show us the goods!
>
>
/makemicromusic/files/keyboard/tnupleft.
GIF
>

Hmmm ... accidentals are very fuzzy, and I can't
distinguish anything apart from the three most
common standard accidentals: flat, sharp, natural.
I certainly wouldn't be able to play this example,
with any confidence, since I'm uncertain what to
tune the modified notes to - my best guess is that
it's just all in 12-EDO. (Is it?)

This example only reinforces my feeling that any
accidentals *other* than these three need to be
visually *very* distinct from them in order to be
useful in practical situations. Of course, this
example approcahes the smallest possible size type
for people with average to older vision to read at
all - but that's precisely when we need the utmost
clarity.

Regards,
Yahya

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🔗threesixesinarow <CACCOLA@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Yahya Abdal-Aziz" <yahya@...>
wrote:

> > /makemicromusic/files/
keyboard/tnupleft.GIF
> >
>
> Hmmm ... accidentals are very fuzzy, and I can't
> distinguish anything apart from the three most
> common standard accidentals: flat, sharp, natural.
> I certainly wouldn't be able to play this example,
> with any confidence, since I'm uncertain what to
> tune the modified notes to - my best guess is that
> it's just all in 12-EDO. (Is it?)
>

22, not current but gives an idea how to tune it in a more comparative
than counting kind of way - the numbers are beat rates, with
extraneous precision just so you know which one in the pairs should
sound slower or faster.

I had a hard time using Lime, you can adjust the position of the
accidentals but I didn't notice a way to change their size and the
only way I could get it to output a file (after trial and error
numeric margin adjustment) was through pdf995, here's the original
http://www.geocities.com/threesixesinarow/sag.pdf

Clark

> This example only reinforces my feeling that any
> accidentals *other* than these three need to be
> visually *very* distinct from them in order to be
> useful in practical situations. Of course, this
> example approcahes the smallest possible size type
> for people with average to older vision to read at
> all - but that's precisely when we need the utmost
> clarity.
>
> Regards,
> Yahya
>
> --
> No virus found in this outgoing message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.7.0/345 - Release Date: 22/5/
06
>

🔗Prent Rodgers <prentrodgers@...>

🔗Hudson Lacerda <hfmlacerda@...>

Prent Rodgers escreveu:
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, c.m.bryan <chrismbryan@...> wrote:
> >>Cool. Very cool.
>>
>>Has anyone implemented saggital in lilypond? That would be really
>>sweet... it just looks so freakin' awesome.
>>
>>-chris
>>
>>
> > I tried and gave up. Someone who knows lilypond would have to do this.

Someone really interested in lilypond can always sponsor a new feature:
http://lilypond.org/web/sponsor/
http://lilypond.org/web/sponsor/options

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🔗c.m.bryan <chrismbryan@...>

🔗Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...>

From "threesixesinarow" CACCOLA@... on Thu May 25, 2006:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Yahya Abdal-Aziz" <yahya@...>
> wrote:
>
> > > /makemicromusic/files/
> keyboard/tnupleft.GIF
> > >
> >
> > Hmmm ... accidentals are very fuzzy, and I can't
> > distinguish anything apart from the three most
> > common standard accidentals: flat, sharp, natural.
> > I certainly wouldn't be able to play this example,
> > with any confidence, since I'm uncertain what to
> > tune the modified notes to - my best guess is that
> > it's just all in 12-EDO. (Is it?)
> >
>
> 22, not current but gives an idea how to tune it in a more comparative
> than counting kind of way - the numbers are beat rates, with
> extraneous precision just so you know which one in the pairs should
> sound slower or faster.
>
> I had a hard time using Lime, you can adjust the position of the
> accidentals but I didn't notice a way to change their size and the
> only way I could get it to output a file (after trial and error
> numeric margin adjustment) was through pdf995, here's the original
> http://www.geocities.com/threesixesinarow/sag.pdf
>
> Clark
>
> > This example only reinforces my feeling that any
> > accidentals *other* than these three need to be
> > visually *very* distinct from them in order to be
> > useful in practical situations. Of course, this
> > example approcahes the smallest possible size type
> > for people with average to older vision to read at
> > all - but that's precisely when we need the utmost
> > clarity.

Thanks, Clark, the accidentals are perfectly clear on
the pdf file, once I get to 150% magnification.

Regards,
Yahya

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