Microtonal Chord Progression player

Hi There,

I've been working on a chord progression player for Fractal Tune Smithy,
which of course is microtonal :-).

http://www.robertinventor.com/chord_progr_player.htm

The way it works is that you use any standard notations such as Am7, Csus2, V7 etc,
and enter the chord progression into the text field, and play it immediately.
You can also set a rhythm, add a count in, and it also recognises repeats,
and flow directions such as DcAlFine and DsAlCoda.

You can play the chords as chords, broken chords or figurations and you
can do transpositions of any of the chords in the progression
up / down by octaves and use chord inversions. E.g. .Am7 is the first
inversion of Am7.

Anyway the thing of interest here is that, well of course, it can be played
in any scale you like - not just twelve tone ones though,
they can have any numbers of notes to an octave as it looks to the
closest pitches to the chords in the current scale. You can use
31, 72, 19 or 12 tone notations for the roots of the chords at
present, also solfeggio note names which as it has seventeen names to an
octave I've mapped to 17 equal.

Also you can try other flavours of chords such as harmonic series chords,
and the septimal subminor and supermajor chords, etc.

Examples: Ch7 for the harmonic seventh chord, Ch11 for the harmonic 11th etc.
Csm for the septimal subminor or Cs for the supermajor and so on (s = septimal)

Cj for the just intonation major chord 1/1 5/4 3/2 and you can choose
between the dominant seventh with 9/5 or 16/9 - use Ck7 for the 9/5 dom7th.

So then you use this same notation for all just 5 limit chords,
e.g. Cjm for the just minor chord, or Cjsus2 to add a 9/8 etc.

It plays the closest pitches to the desired chord in the current scale.
Or if you want the chord to play exact pitches, prefix with x, e.g.
xGh11 to play a haromonic eleventh chord rooted on the G of the current scale.
So xGh11 will play 1/1 5/4 3/2 7/4 9/4 11/4 with the 1/1 set to whatever is
the G in the current scale.

Interested in any comments on how it works, suggestions for improvements for the
future and so forth. Also any suggestions of good twelve tone scales
to use for new notations.

The main things I have in mind to do already is to extend the support for making
your own chords and to support the Scala list of named chords. Then also I'll add
in some kind of option to give the rhythm a swing, and to let user set a groove.
Then will be an idea to add in some example chord progressions too probably.

It uses a lower priority method for playing the notes rather than the ultra high
priority multimedia note scheduling that FTS uses for playing the fractal tunes.
The main effect of this is that the rhythm is more easily disturbed if you
have heavy activity on your computer, so it works best if you keep things
quiet, and close other programs that are running if you find there
are irregularities in the rhythm. This is just pro-tem - I'll
do an update presently that plays at the highest priority.

(e.g. on my computer, I have a scanner cover sensor which seemingly
puts on a heavy load on the CPU every few seconds to check if the
scanner is on and the lid is open - that sort of thing could throw
it).

The player itself is completely free at present. Later, when I add in the lively
rhythm options then those will time out after ten minutes in freeware mode.

Has anyone done any work on compiling lists of microtonal chord progressions
along the lines of all those sits with extensive lists of twelve tone chord progressions?

Thanks,

Robert

http://www.robertinventor.com