Sibelius Playback

Hi all,

as a sibelius user, the 1/4 tone playback works, but only on a per part
basis, a chord with different 1/4 tone symbols won't play properly, as the
plug-in only adds hidden text pitch bends. The pitch bend prog looks for
certain symbols (accidentals) and then puts in the appropriate pitch bend.
If the line is Monophonic per Midi channel, then you could adapt the
sibelius plugin to add other pitch bends, for your own accidentals, if you
want to play with your own font. Sibelius doen't support too many
accidentals as default and font writing is very specalised. Better would be
an accidental assignment dialog, with slots for up to say 10-12 additional
accidental symbols, which can be like oher made up Sibelius lines, i.e.
compounds of other font symbols (then you could have all sorts of things as
accidentals). It would b nice if these has an associated pitch bend, then
Sib could play them right from the word GO...

My only beef is that the Midi commands for pitch bend only seem to work for
the coarse bend, and the fine bend is not used at all. I have had to put up
with the default bend of 2 12ET semitones, and divide that into 128 steps.
That gives about 3cent per step, which is pretty crude. Anyone know the midi
message for getting the PB to be +/- 50cent max?

Mark

--- In tuning@y..., Mark Gould <mark.gould@a...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_35607.html#35607

> Hi all,
>
> as a sibelius user, the 1/4 tone playback works, but only on a per
part basis, a chord with different 1/4 tone symbols won't play
properly, as the plug-in only adds hidden text pitch bends. The pitch
bend prog looks for certain symbols (accidentals) and then puts in
the appropriate pitch bend.

***Hello Mark! Thanks so much for your commentary! Well, apparently
chords *will* work, but only if they all have quartertones ie. either
ALL quartertones up and down simultaneously (up to 4 voices.)

My impression is that this will not work for chords made up of
*different* microtones other than the quartertone or or chords
comprised of *both* "regular" semitones and quartertones. (That's
what they say, too...)

I don't believe it would be accurate for chords containing, say a 6th
of a tone up *and* a 6th of a tone down simultaneously, since I was
finding different values for those in my experimentation...

Hopefully, that is a limitation they will "improve upon" some day.
They seem to still be developing this product daily. I think if they
get repeated input from microtonal composers, more will happen.

So everybody should write to them, visit the "chat" group, etc. and
urge them to "refine" these things.

But, at least the software *WILL* play back various kinds of
microtones, at least monophonically...

If the line is Monophonic per Midi channel, then you could adapt the
sibelius plugin to add other pitch bends, for your own accidentals,
if you want to play with your own font.

***Yes, and other people have already designed some, like Ted Mook's
PostScript fonts for the Ezra Sims accidentals. I'm having no
problems with those in Sibelius, but one must remember to install
Adobe Type Manager first, or they won't work! :)

Sibelius doen't support too many
> accidentals as default and font writing is very specalised. Better
would be an accidental assignment dialog, with slots for up to say 10-
12 additional accidental symbols, which can be like oher made up
Sibelius lines, i.e. compounds of other font symbols (then you could
have all sorts of things as accidentals). It would b nice if these
has an associated pitch bend, then Sib could play them right from the
word GO...

***Absolutely! Another good "chat room" discussion. Maybe if we
write to them *every day!* :)

>
> My only beef is that the Midi commands for pitch bend only seem to
work for the coarse bend, and the fine bend is not used at all. I
have had to put up with the default bend of 2 12ET semitones, and
divide that into 128 steps.
> That gives about 3cent per step, which is pretty crude. Anyone know
the midi message for getting the PB to be +/- 50cent max?
>

***Yes, I tried the "fine bend" which, supposedly, would have a
resolution of .02 cents... but I couldn't get it to work, either.

Well, I guess I'm also stuck with a 3 cent resolution. However,
since the definition of the 72-tET system I'm using is only 3 cents,
anyway, I guess that isn't *too* much of a sacrifice.

Gee.. I hope none of the performers uses any *VIBRATO*.... !

***Oh... by the way, it's *FOUR* 12-tET semitones that constitutes
the range divided by 128 or *two* whole tones = 400/128 = 3 cents, as
you have above.

Thanks again!

jp