sonance modulation & controllers (was: Hey JdL)

John,

First of all I agree that including the ability to
optimize *away* from just is intriguing and I am
pleased as punch that that capability was used
(unbeknownst to me) in the first adaptatuned piece that
I was batty about. Believe it or not, several months
ago I was grousing to a certain other list member (who
didn't really want to hear about it I am sure) about
what I thought your program did and said that if I ever
got around to making my own adaptive tuning program I
would have it do things like maximize dissonance
instead of consonance. I had made notes about such a
system before -- the idea is you route the continuous
value foot pedal or any other controller into the
algorithm so that the composer can control the
targetting -- pedal all the way one way targets low
limit just intervals. Pedal all the other way targets
the near-just region of maximum dissonance.

I think such capability could profitably and trivially
easily be added to your program by routing pedal value
to your spring coefficient. Pedal the one way is
positive, the other way is negative. In the middle
zero?? (Would that mean fixed to the target scale?)

Fun fun fun! I know there are some of you salivating
over this as I speak.

Anyway, you're so close to doing this I thought I'd
toss it your way since it means I don't even have to
thing about writing my own version to disprove your
version -- your version sounds like it is becoming a
all-inclusive general solution and thus extremely
appealing. Go John!

> Unused controllers, huh... Are you referring to the RPN and
> NRPN guys, or to plain ol' Bx xx xx messages?

CC sure is more convenient than PRN/NRPN as a lot of
software (like the really old DOS and Atari stuff a lot
of people say they are using) can not easily handle
these messages (since you gotta send your MSB LSB and
then data all the time and if you want to interleave
messages, need to atomicize the sequence.) Best if the
sequencer has this support built in. If you do
recognize the [N]RPN messages, make sure you support
use of either & both these and CCs. No reason not to.

> Are holes in the latter guaranteed to remain throughout time,
> I wonder?

Absolutely not no way no how!

> Are they often overloaded by others?

In every single case without exception! :-)

I know a lot about this and so I will say FOR SURE that
you should let the composer select whatever controllers
he wants to use. You can make up some defaults if you
like for a bit of standardization but definitly the
composer should be able to override them. Why? Because
most pro level instruments already let you redefine
many the controllers anyway and so it is important to
be able to route around CC #s that a composer is
already using.

- Jeff

Thanks, Jeff, for your detailed suggestions (now a couple of days ago,
in: /tuning/topicId_26278.html#26278 ). If I'm
understanding you correctly, I'd let my program do a first-pass tuning
of a sequence, then as it was played in real-time, the composer (or
sequencer) would use the foot-pedal to impose in essence a multiplier
to all the deviations from 12-tET (this could include negative
direction). The program would apply this overtop the original plan,
and save a new file with this action incorporated.

No, you're saying that I'd need to calculate two sets of tunings for
the piece, one maximally consonant and the other maximally dissonant,
and the pedal would slide along that line, yes? Very interesting!

Your thoughts on Continuous Controllers sound good. I've gotta go back
and refresh my memory on MSB/LSB order; the LSB comes last, right?
Wheee!

JdL