Harmony Assistant, microtonal

Hi all...

Just sort of a progress report... I've been playing with the latest
version of Harmony Assistant from Myriad. It has reasonable microtonal
support for many purposes. Each note that can be notated can be assigned an
offset from 12-tET, up to 200 cents + or -. Enharmonics can be differently
tuned, and it supports a number of extra accidental signs besides just
sharp and flat. It seems to handle tunings well if they can be expressed in
terms of ordinary notation, with a few kinds of accidentals. Should handle
various kinds of JI. Handles 19-tET with an example shipped.

I made a 17-tET tuning table for it. It is rather excruciating to edit the
microtonal adjustments... You have to make a new set of "rules", then
drill down through 2 levels of pop-up panels for each element of the tuning
(rule) that you're going to work with, then fuss with a slider. But it
works.

I made the virtual singer sing a 17-tET chromatic scale and saved the
"rules" for that in a file. Each staff can have a different set of rules,
so multiple simultaneous tunings are possible.

The program can also handle MIDI out, simultaneous with its internal sound
rendering, so I was able to use Virtual Singer in one channel and send
another channel to VAZ Modular and Rhino, and hear the mix. It can also
apparently handle output of alternatively tuned MIDI via pitch bends on
channels, so it's one method that could be used to tune other MIDI
instruments, for people comfortable working with scores and standard
notation.

For the price, it's a very nice piece of software.

Rick

There's also a lower-priced version called Melody Assistant that seems
to have the full microtonal capability. It is, as Rick said, a pain
to set it up but once you have a suitable rules set you can reuse it.
(Post rules sets to this groups files area, maybe?) A factor to keep
in mind is that MA/HA does use standard notation; you can attach
nonstandard accidentals but it's a little awkward, and you have to use
the symbols they've got.

- Rich Holmes

Three remarks --

1. A quick way to set up microtonal rules is just to tweak the sets packaged with HA for 19tet and for natural horn and barbershop quartet (both are JI rule sets).

2. The developers have set up a forum for voting on modifications. I hope that some of you will add votes to the proposal to increase tuning accuracy, and maybe someone has ideas on the open question about how to change a scala file into a rule set. If a handful of MMM readers get on this, we could probably shape HA into a very useful product.

3. You are not restricted to the Stoccata font set -- from the online help:

"""

Each staff in your document can use a different character set. The same character set can blend several fonts.

To change the character set related to a staff, edit the staff display options ("Staff" menu) and select a character set in the pop-up menu. To apply this set to the whole score, check the "Apply to all staves" box.

If the character set you are selecting uses a font that is not installed on your computer, an alert message is displayed. Correct display of the staff will then only be possible on a computer that owns this font.

"""

Daniel Wolf