Scala to Csound (digest 1072 topic 2)

> TUNING Digest 1072
> 2) Re: Scala to Csound (digest 1064 topic 2)
> by jpff@maths.bath.ac.uk
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Csound contains operators for dealing with any equally divided scale,
> repeating at any interval in teh score; it also has facilities for
> handling non-equal scales at any repeat interval. This has been there
> for a long time now. Look at cpsxpch.

Thanks John. I have looked at cpspch. It seems to me to be related to
pitch class, which is inherently related to modulo-12. For that reason, I
tried another way. I thought it was more exact (and therefore less likely
to mislead) to use modulo-7 numbers, rather than modulo-12.

In my demo program - which I cooked up for students to discover the
differences in the sound of triads produced on 2-limit and 3-limit scales
as discussed in Doty's book - I found a way to do this using cpsoct as
Scala also gives values (using SHOW/FREQ) that contain the tuning in
oct+cps. In my program, pitch is defined in the .ORC file using goto
statements which access 7 oscils that contain

cpsoct (ioctave + ktonic)
cpsoct (ioctave + ksupertonic)
cpsoct (ioctave + kmediant)
cpsoct (ioctave + ksubdominant)
cpsoct (ioctave + kdominant)
cpsoct (ioctave + ksubmediant)
cpsoct (ioctave + ksupermediant)

The values of ktonic, ksupertonic, etc.. are defined in the .ORC files.
Pitch can then be specified in the .SCO file as two parameters, octave
number and percentage of an octave. The .SCO files are as easy for the
user to read in cpsoct as they are in cpspch too.

Maybe the question should be : is it being too pedantic to try and express
these JI pitches in a numbering system other than 12. What do you think ?
Anyway, I hope to post the code on Mark's website later this week.

http://www.pacificnet.net/~nowitzky/justint/greg.htm

I'll inform the list when it is ready. Thanks Mark for setting this up.

Aside from the issue of expressing pitches without using pitch classes,
it's been suggested that I use Pearl as a string editor on a PC to tailor
Scala output by stripping away unwanted character strings. This would
allow me to generate Csound .SCO and .ORC files entirely from within
Scala. Has anyone done this already ?

Greg S

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