Improving Rationale?

Hi all.

Yesterday, Friday, I gave a presentation on Rationale at the 2013 Linux Audio Conference. I hadn't done much with it in a couple years, having become more absorbed in playing banjo (you just got to sometimes).

The crowd at this conference is pretty knowledgeable about Csound, but it's again come up that Rationale would be easier and more fun to use if it had more intuitive output options. I tried MIDI for a while but it was a bust. Rationale uses Csound as its audio engine, and Csound can't use more than one MIDI output device. I'm mulling over a couple other ideas:

ZynAddSubFX seems to have flexible tuning, but a max of 128 notes, and a Rationale piece could have more. If automatically changing the tuning list were possible, it would work 100%.

Lilypond output- This would be easy to implement and could produce "standard" notation, possibly with Johnston's accidentals, for Rationale pieces. Not a solution for audio, though.

Outputting Scala's .scl file format would also be a cinch. It was even part of the inspiration for Rationale, with the option to transpose sections. Scala appears to have decent control over MIDI. Could this be a solution???

Hope you are all doing well. Happy music-making!
-Chuckk

On Sunday 12 May 2013 0:24:49 touchedchuckk wrote:

> The crowd at this conference is pretty knowledgeable
> about Csound, but it's again come up that Rationale
> would be easier and more fun to use if it had more
> intuitive output options. I tried MIDI for a while but
> it was a bust. Rationale uses Csound as its audio
> engine, and Csound can't use more than one MIDI output
> device. I'm mulling over a couple other ideas:

I don't know where Rationale is now, but … yes. Csound can
be made intuitive if you have pre-packaged instruments for
it. Csound as a MIDI output device is far from ideal.

> ZynAddSubFX seems to have flexible tuning, but a max of
> 128 notes, and a Rationale piece could have more. If
> automatically changing the tuning list were possible, it
> would work 100%.

I can only ever get it to use 128 notes globally. There's
some support for transpositions but you need the scale pre-
defined.

> Lilypond output- This would be easy to implement and
> could produce "standard" notation, possibly with
> Johnston's accidentals, for Rationale pieces. Not a
> solution for audio, though.

Yes, it does good visual output. I've got a setup for
writing JI with Sagittal. It worked before but there were
spacing issues with the latest version I checked it with.
Support for chained accidentals could be done, and more
easily if you don't need the MIDI output. I haven't done
it. It would be easier if you could define the alterations
for a fixed set of pitches.

Timidity supports arbitrary pitches with MIDI tuning
standard messages. It works with Sound Fonts, but I don't
think it implements the whole standard. I use it with the
Fluid Synth instruments and some of them don't work. So I
don't know how easy it is to get the best quality output
from it but the tunings are very versatile.

Graham

Hi,

Am 12.05.2013 01:24, schrieb touchedchuckk:
>
>
> Hi all.
>
> Yesterday, Friday, I gave a presentation on Rationale at the 2013
> Linux Audio Conference. I hadn't done much with it in a couple years,
> having become more absorbed in playing banjo (you just got to sometimes).
>
> The crowd at this conference is pretty knowledgeable about Csound, but
> it's again come up that Rationale would be easier and more fun to use
> if it had more intuitive output options. I tried MIDI for a while but
> it was a bust. Rationale uses Csound as its audio engine, and Csound
> can't use more than one MIDI output device.
>
You could check out RtMidi/RtAudio or portaudio for MIDI output.³
>
> I'm mulling over a couple other ideas:
>
> ZynAddSubFX seems to have flexible tuning, but a max of 128 notes, and
> a Rationale piece could have more. If automatically changing the
> tuning list were possible, it would work 100%.
>
In case you want to try other microtuning engines, you could have a look
at MUTABOR¹. It is a tuning software can manage several event routes. So
you can use as many synthesizers as you want. At least, you can change
the tunings on the fly.

Some student has written some software using its kernel, Jack and
Python. The advantage and disadvantage is that you would need another
tool as synthesizer. Details can be discussed via PM.
>
> Lilypond output- This would be easy to implement and could produce
> "standard" notation, possibly with Johnston's accidentals, for
> Rationale pieces. Not a solution for audio, though.
>
Did you have a look at GUIDO music notation? ² In theory, at least
MUTABOR can play such files (it may be broken in current beta).
>
> Outputting Scala's .scl file format would also be a cinch. It was even
> part of the inspiration for Rationale, with the option to transpose
> sections. Scala appears to have decent control over MIDI. Could this
> be a solution???
>
Regards,

Tobias
--------------------------

¹Tutorial: http://schlemmersoft.de/en/Mutabor%20tutorial
Homepage: http://mutabor.berlios.de/
²http://guidolib.sourceforge.net/
³http://trac.chrisarndt.de/code/wiki/python-rtmidi
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~harrison/code.html
>
>
> Hope you are all doing well. Happy music-making!
> -Chuckk
>
>

Thanks for the info, Graham. I kind of skipped over MTS because it seemed like an empty promise. It wouldn't be impossible to make Rationale capable of sending it, but I haven't spent much time with it in a while.

I was looking at this Garritan ARIA player and it appears to be able to load Scala files with more than 12 scale steps, and to be able to run multiple instances.

I've now discovered that Pure Data can run as a Python library! This means it could be used from within Rationale to send MIDI data to multiple devices.

Lots of work to do!

-Chuckk

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Graham Breed <gbreed@...> wrote:
>
> On Sunday 12 May 2013 0:24:49 touchedchuckk wrote:
>
> > The crowd at this conference is pretty knowledgeable
> > about Csound, but it's again come up that Rationale
> > would be easier and more fun to use if it had more
> > intuitive output options. I tried MIDI for a while but
> > it was a bust. Rationale uses Csound as its audio
> > engine, and Csound can't use more than one MIDI output
> > device. I'm mulling over a couple other ideas:
>
> I don't know where Rationale is now, but … yes. Csound can
> be made intuitive if you have pre-packaged instruments for
> it. Csound as a MIDI output device is far from ideal.
>
> > ZynAddSubFX seems to have flexible tuning, but a max of
> > 128 notes, and a Rationale piece could have more. If
> > automatically changing the tuning list were possible, it
> > would work 100%.
>
> I can only ever get it to use 128 notes globally. There's
> some support for transpositions but you need the scale pre-
> defined.
>
> > Lilypond output- This would be easy to implement and
> > could produce "standard" notation, possibly with
> > Johnston's accidentals, for Rationale pieces. Not a
> > solution for audio, though.
>
> Yes, it does good visual output. I've got a setup for
> writing JI with Sagittal. It worked before but there were
> spacing issues with the latest version I checked it with.
> Support for chained accidentals could be done, and more
> easily if you don't need the MIDI output. I haven't done
> it. It would be easier if you could define the alterations
> for a fixed set of pitches.
>
> Timidity supports arbitrary pitches with MIDI tuning
> standard messages. It works with Sound Fonts, but I don't
> think it implements the whole standard. I use it with the
> Fluid Synth instruments and some of them don't work. So I
> don't know how easy it is to get the best quality output
> from it but the tunings are very versatile.
>
>
> Graham
>