Truth in Tuning

Since there seems to be some renewed interest in FasTrak, it
might be appropriate to discuss some of the thinking that went
into it's design. Most of this has been said here before, but
that was a long time ago. Those who are interested could read my
posts in the archives.

I was struck in 1964 by the idea that it was possible to use
electronic methods to produce nearly absolutely exact tuning, and
I have devoted about 12-15 man years of fairly intense effort
trying to bring that idea into the cultural mainstream. FasTrak
was only one of a long series of projects designed to realize
that goal. The road has been long and painful, consisting of
prototypes, patents, business disasters, poverty, family
hardships, financial backers, negotiations with corporations, and
lots of hard work. I had lots of fun, and don't regret any of
it, but my gross receipts for all that effort remain less than
$100.00. It is true that when I have to work at something
besides music, I can make a comfortable living using skills that
I developed largely for this quest--although I do have another
interest or two that are nearly as intense.

Perhaps things are easier now, but my experience makes me a
little wary of putting large amounts of energy into such projects
when I am facing a retirement that will probably be a lot less
opulent than I could have enjoyed by focusing more on larger
paychecks and less on changing the world.

With FasTrak, what you see is what you hear. It is designed to
expose the hardware primitives you are dealing with, and let you
make the basic decisions.

It only uses FM synthesis because FM synthesis is the only
commercially available tuning technology that publishes its
tuning specs. I have currently been working on some DSP based
technology that could be considerably better than FM synthesis,
but my time is extremely limited by the fact that I have a day
job, [Software QA Engineer], and by the fact that I have a non-
music project going that could potentially bring in very large
amounts of cash.

If I can't guarantee the tuning of my music software, then I
won't write it, therefore I will either have to build my own
hardware, or some manufacturer will have to decide to release his
tuning "secrets" to me.

I think that electronic music manufacturer's are seriously
shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to publish tuning
specs. Using acoustical instruments, musicians can microtune in
real time. Most electronic musical instruments don't provide
that capability. 12ET has been a rule that was honored largely
in the breach, but electronic musical instruments, virtually all
of which have absolute tuning accuracy [who knows to what
model?], have changed all that, and their market share will never
grow to what it could be until their tuning deficiencies are
overcome.

FasTrak is designed to be a useful tool to someone who is willing
to put in the time to learn. Any feature that would slow down
its functioning but make it initially easier to use has been
omitted. In addition, using FasTrak requires fluency in DOS,
dealing with directories, command line redirection, and such, and
a basic understanding of elementary number theory is extremely
helpful.

But once you have mastered FasTrak, I don't think there is any
environment that can equal it for producing quality JI
compositions quickly.

Marion



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