Promenade tuning examples

Hi David; thanks for your email!

At 03:03 PM 8/20/98 EDT, you wrote:
>About a year ago I listened to these Moussorgsky examples and picked the
>12-tET one. Since then, I've learned that SoundBlasters respond to MIDI
>pitchbend commands in unconventional ways. This means that I was hearing the
>ET one correctly, but the JI version was out of tune. No wonder it sucked!

When I pieced together the Moussorgsky MIDI files, along with other MIDI
files reachable via http://www.pacificnet.net/~nowitzky/justint, I also
found out that "pitch bend" did not seem to have a standardized
implementation. At the time, I was hoping I found the most-commonly-used
implementation. It seemed to be most often implemented as follows (where
100 cents = an equal tempered semitone):

bend -8192 means "bend flat 200 cents
bend -4096 means "bend flat 100 cents
bend +0 means "don't bend it"
bend +4096 means "bend sharp 100 cents
bend +8192 means "bend sharp 200 cents

In other words, I hoped it was 4096 per half-step, and that it was "linear".

I haven't experimented with different sound cards too much, but so far I
found out that some will completely ignore pitch bend commands, and others
will bend the notes to some amount other than a half-step for a value of
4096. I even heard that the amount it bends for value 4096 can be some sort
of user-changeable parameter, which might be okay for some sort of live
performance machine with a real pitch wheel on it, but would give all sorts
of weird sounds when trying to playback a MIDI file on a different PC.

>Having now heard it on a Mac, which does respond to PBs in the standard way, I
>must certainly retract my previous vote and cast it in favor of the 5-lim JI
>version.

I'm still rooting for 5-limit JI myself!

I was considering having some sort of "test your sound-card" web page, to
see if the user's sound card reacted the way it needed to get the desired
tuning. I stumbled across someone else's page that had some microtonal
examples, that didn't work on my PC. Instead of using "pitch bend"
commands, it was using some sort of "system exclusive" commands, which I
guess only worked on a particular manufacturer's sound card (It might have
been for a Roland keyboard in this case). Anyway, that page did have a
"testing" option, which helped me see that I didn't have the right
equipment. It kept playing a note, saying that the note should be changing
(and it didn't change on my lousy sound card).

>Thanks for a fun and informative page!

Thank you for the fun and informative email!

--Mark
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| Mark Nowitzky |
| email: nowitzky@alum.mit.edu AIM: Nowitzky |
| www: http://www.pacificnet.net/~nowitzky |
| "If you haven't visited Mark Nowitzky's home |
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