Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Sagittal mentioned on Making Notes blog

...Wow.

This is the group that we assumed wouldn't be receptive to anything, right?
I remember we were in agreement before that we need to make our requests to
them minimalist, and we got into a discussion about just how minimalist we
can make things and still have them all work out. Yet, they've voluntarily
implemented Sagittal! I'm quite speechless.

And, since most score programs allow for you to come up with staves with a
custom number of lines, this basically enables you to do any notation
system - including my KISS thing, or some kind of KISS-sagittal hybrid, or
whatever.

The only thing we could possibly ask for on top of this is some sort of
playback mechanism. If we can get our foot in the door here with something
simple that they can actually do, we'll have the perfect microtonal scoring
system. Something that just enables it to integrate with Scala's keymapping
thing would be enough!

What do you think would be the best way to go? I'll give up all hope of
using MTS and etc in favor of just arriving at the simplest way possible
for playback.

Mike

On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:

> **
>
>
> Greetings from Salt Lake City airport.
>
> http://blog.steinberg.net/2013/08/development-diary-part-two/
>
> This is the blog of some folks at Steinberg who are trying to make a
> Sibelius successor of sorts. Here they announce an update to their Bravura
> font, which now includes Sagittal glyphs. George and Dave are even
> mentioned by name. Congrats gentlemen!
>
> -Carl
>
>
>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

I left a comment for them here (still awaiting moderation for the
moment): http://blog.steinberg.net/2013/08/development-diary-part-two/#comment-593

I hope they read it and stop by!

The text is reproduced as follows:

Hello,

I’m the moderator for Yahoo’s tuning list, found at
/tuning, which focuses on alternative
tunings (often called “microtonal” tunings). I also administer
Facebook’s “Xenharmonic Alliance” group, a counterpart to the list,
found athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/xenharmonic2/. We’re overjoyed
to see that you’ve decided to implement Sagittal!

We believe that our community has a powerful contribution to make to
21st century music. Yet, though the overall size of group is very
large, far too often we’ve been ignored by the music software
community, leaving us with a dearth of tools we need to actually make
music. This in turn causes us to make less music, turns newcomers off
from the community, which finally causes us to be ignored more by
major software developers, in a vicious circle. That you’ve taken the
initiative to give us a major piece of software with Sagittal support
is a huge step forward for us, and we’re very excited about this!

The question on everyone’s mind is: do you intend to implement
microtonal playback support as well?

The microtonal community would be elated if there existed even a
cursory, easy-to-implement, workable solution for us to actually hear
our scores played back in the tunings which we’ve composed them in. It
would be a huge advancement for our group to have even something which
only solves the problem halfway, but which integrates in a larger
workflow with other tools that we currently use to arrive at the
solution. We recognize that now, in this crucial development phase of
this new software, would be a good time to make our voices heard!

I invite you to stop by at the tuning list as well, should you desire
any general feedback from our community, as well as clarity on precise
mathematical and technical recommendations on which simple things
would benefit the most microtonalists. And again, THANK YOU for
implementing Sagittal, and enabling the larger microtonal community to
finally take a leap forward – we’re all watching this blog very
carefully!

Best,
Mike Battaglia

----

On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...Wow.
>
> This is the group that we assumed wouldn't be receptive to anything, right?
> I remember we were in agreement before that we need to make our requests to
> them minimalist, and we got into a discussion about just how minimalist we
> can make things and still have them all work out. Yet, they've voluntarily
> implemented Sagittal! I'm quite speechless.
>
> And, since most score programs allow for you to come up with staves with a
> custom number of lines, this basically enables you to do any notation system
> - including my KISS thing, or some kind of KISS-sagittal hybrid, or
> whatever.
>
> The only thing we could possibly ask for on top of this is some sort of
> playback mechanism. If we can get our foot in the door here with something
> simple that they can actually do, we'll have the perfect microtonal scoring
> system. Something that just enables it to integrate with Scala's keymapping
> thing would be enough!
>
> What do you think would be the best way to go? I'll give up all hope of
> using MTS and etc in favor of just arriving at the simplest way possible for
> playback.
>
> Mike
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Greetings from Salt Lake City airport.
>>
>> http://blog.steinberg.net/2013/08/development-diary-part-two/
>>
>> This is the blog of some folks at Steinberg who are trying to make a
>> Sibelius successor of sorts. Here they announce an update to their Bravura
>> font, which now includes Sagittal glyphs. George and Dave are even mentioned
>> by name. Congrats gentlemen!
>>
>> -Carl
>>
>>
>
>

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗graham <gbreed@...>

On Thu, 08 Aug 2013 15:16:45 -0000
"Carl Lumma" <carl@...> wrote:

> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > What does implementing Sagittal entail, other than putting
> > some glyphs in a font?
>
> We were talking about playback features, monzo representation
> of pitches with casting to different temperaments, etc.
> Remember?

Good morning from Amsterdam Schipol!

With Lilypond, you can write music in just intonation, with ratios, and
have it display in Sagittal (with wrinkles) or other systems of
accidentals. And get playback with pitch bends that can be converted
to MTS. I'd expect something similar as "Sagittal support" for a
graphical program – but with real time output.

Graham

🔗graham <gbreed@...>

On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:01:59 -0400
Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> And, since most score programs allow for you to come up with staves
> with a custom number of lines, this basically enables you to do any
> notation system - including my KISS thing, or some kind of
> KISS-sagittal hybrid, or whatever.

Helmholtz-Ellis notations are harder than Sagittal because they require
multiple glyphs for an accidental. They're even harder if you want
those accidentals to be tied to playback and work with transpositions.

There are weirder notations like my tricycle, where the extra symbols
don't correspond to small intervals, but place the pitch in one of
three categories. The notation for that can be as strange as you
like. I currently implement it as fingerings because Lilypond has
support for fingerings. You can do the same with any moderately
capable notation program so long as you don't care about the output.

> The only thing we could possibly ask for on top of this is some sort
> of playback mechanism. If we can get our foot in the door here with
> something simple that they can actually do, we'll have the perfect
> microtonal scoring system. Something that just enables it to
> integrate with Scala's keymapping thing would be enough!

Yes, playback is pretty crucial. I'm repeatedly disappointed by
microtonalists who want to produce scores with interesting symbols but
don't care to hear the noises those symbols imply.

> What do you think would be the best way to go? I'll give up all hope
> of using MTS and etc in favor of just arriving at the simplest way
> possible for playback.

MTS is fine and works, even if only with Timidity. If some other
format worked with the built-in synth, that would be fine as well. You
only need one way to preview the music. MTS is about as simple as it
gets, though (at least if you ignore the things that make it less
simple) and once it puts the information there you can convert it to
any other format you like.

Tuning table support is good as well. There are some cases where you
want a fixed pitch set and others where you don't. I like full support
for scordablature, so if you're going to have MIDI output for a tuning
table, have a score indicating what somebody would play on a normal
keyboard to produce it. That might help in getting a professional
quality performance.

Graham