Microtonal Chord Progression player

Hi There,

I've been working on a chord progression player for Fractal Tune Smithy,
which of course is microtonal :-).

http://www.robertinventor.com/chord_progr_player.htm

The way it works is that you use any standard notations such as Am7, Csus2, V7 etc,
and enter the chord progression into the text field, and play it immediately.
You can also set a rhythm, add a count in, and it also recognises repeats,
and flow directions such as DcAlFine and DsAlCoda.

You can play the chords as chords, broken chords or figurations and you
can do transpositions of any of the chords in the progression
up / down by octaves and use chord inversions. E.g. .Am7 is the first
inversion of Am7.

Anyway the thing of interest here is that, well of course, it can be played
in any scale you like - not just twelve tone ones though,
they can have any numbers of notes to an octave as it looks to the
closest pitches to the chords in the current scale. You can use
31, 72, 19 or 12 tone notations for the roots of the chords at
present, also solfeggio note names which as it has seventeen names to an
octave I've mapped to 17 equal.

Also you can try other flavours of chords such as harmonic series chords,
and the septimal subminor and supermajor chords, etc.

Examples: Ch7 for the harmonic seventh chord, Ch11 for the harmonic 11th etc.
Csm for the septimal subminor or Cs for the supermajor and so on (s = septimal)

Cj for the just intonation major chord 1/1 5/4 3/2 and you can choose
between the dominant seventh with 9/5 or 16/9 - use Ck7 for the 9/5 dom7th.

So then you use this same notation for all just 5 limit chords,
e.g. Cjm for the just minor chord, or Cjsus2 to add a 9/8 etc.

It plays the closest pitches to the desired chord in the current scale.
Or if you want the chord to play exact pitches, prefix with x, e.g.
xGh11 to play a haromonic eleventh chord rooted on the G of the current scale.
So xGh11 will play 1/1 5/4 3/2 7/4 9/4 11/4 with the 1/1 set to whatever is
the G in the current scale.

Interested in any comments on how it works, suggestions for improvements for the
future and so forth. Also any suggestions of good twelve tone scales
to use for new notations.

The main things I have in mind to do already is to extend the support for making
your own chords and to support the Scala list of named chords. Then also I'll add
in some kind of option to give the rhythm a swing, and to let user set a groove.
Then will be an idea to add in some example chord progressions too probably.

It uses a lower priority method for playing the notes rather than the ultra high
priority multimedia note scheduling that FTS uses for playing the fractal tunes.
The main effect of this is that the rhythm is more easily disturbed if you
have heavy activity on your computer, so it works best if you keep things
quiet, and close other programs that are running if you find there
are irregularities in the rhythm. This is just pro-tem - I'll
do an update presently that plays at the highest priority.

(e.g. on my computer, I have a scanner cover sensor which seemingly
puts on a heavy load on the CPU every few seconds to check if the
scanner is on and the lid is open - that sort of thing could throw
it).

The player itself is completely free at present. Later, when I add in the lively
rhythm options then those will time out after ten minutes in freeware mode.

Has anyone done any work on compiling lists of microtonal chord progressions
along the lines of all those sits with extensive lists of twelve tone chord progressions?

Thanks,

Robert

http://www.robertinventor.com

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@n...>
wrote:
> Hi There,
>
> I've been working on a chord progression player for Fractal Tune
Smithy,
> which of course is microtonal :-).
>
> Interested in any comments on how it works,

I hope to try it out sometime -- when Ara and I purchased and
installed FTS a while back, several things didn't work, we sent a
large number of e-mails asking for support, but got no reply. I'll
let you know when I'm ready to try again, and then I'm sure I'll have
a lot of suggestions for you.

> suggestions for improvements for the
> future and so forth.

One suggestion that immediately comes to mind, though you probably
already have it, is to support different types of half-diminished
seventh chord: in JI, you have 1/7:1/6:1/5:1/4, 5:6:7:9, and
10:12:15:17, and all are distinct and consistently represented in 72-
equal.

Another suggestion is to support non-diatonic systems, such as the
decatonic system in 22-equal of my paper -- you can find that one,
and many others, already implemented in scala.

Until later,
Paul

Hi Paul,

> I hope to try it out sometime -- when Ara and I purchased and
> installed FTS a while back, several things didn't work, we sent a
> large number of e-mails asking for support, but got no reply. I'll
> let you know when I'm ready to try again, and then I'm sure I'll have
> a lot of suggestions for you.

Oh, I'm sorry about that. I never received them. I reply personally to every
support e-mail that I receive, and certainly would never ignore
one from you!!

I wonder what happened. What e-mail address did you send them to?

Wait a minute - did you send them to my old robert@rcwalker.freeserve.co.uk
address? Because that one no longer exists as that was my old
web host which I no longer used.

Anyway if you have copies of your e-mails by any chance,
send them again and I'll go through them.

Maybe you will find that some of the things are working now
that weren't before as there have been many bug fixes
since then.

Maybe the best e-mail address for me is
support@robertinventor.com
as that domain is hosted at my web host.

The other domains are currently hosted at another domain
and are web cloaking ones with e-mail forwarding but I
have never had any problems with those either yet...
If it was that one then let me know and I'll tke it up
with the company that forwards my e-mails for me.

> One suggestion that immediately comes to mind, though you probably
already have it, is to support different types of half-diminished
seventh chord: in JI, you have 1/7:1/6:1/5:1/4, 5:6:7:9, and
10:12:15:17, and all are distinct and consistently represented in 72-
equal.

Oh right. I had been calling those mixed over / under chords.
You can play them in the Lambdoma view with an option to harmonise with chords
above / below each note played - they can be in otonal rows, or utonal rows,
or they can combine both in a single chord. I like those chords a lot :-).

Anyway you can find them in View | Lambdoma | Auto Harmony |
Auto harmony chords with each note | "Polytonality" and choose whether
you want to go up in pitch along the otonal or utonal row of the
Lambdoma.

I don't have them yet in the chords progression player, nor utonal ones yet.
Utonal would be easy, just an inversion of the otonal scale I suppose.
And the mixed one, I suppose you would go down six notes and up six to
support any chords out of say
1/11 1/9 1/7 1/5 1/3 1/1 3/1 5/1 7/1 9/1 11/1 13/1 and their octave
equivalents - just make that into a twelve tone "scale" in some way.
I'll look into it. Or maybe code for it in some other way, maybe I
should shortcut around the twelve tone scale model at that point
and allow mixed otonal and utonal chords with any number of notes
up or down..

> Another suggestion is to support non-diatonic systems, such as the
decatonic system in 22-equal of my paper -- you can find that one,
and many others, already implemented in scala.

Oh right, could do that too. The associated mode ("Arpeggio") would then
be significant - currently ignored in the player as it just assumes
the symbols to be based on normal diatonic or on the 19, 31 or 17
equal diatonic tunings. It is something to keep in mind when I set to
to code the next section.

You can code each chord symbol individually already, by simply specifying which
scale degrees to map each one to using the Extra Chord Symbols window.

But it would be possible to have a generic mapping too. I'll
look into it.

Is your paper on this available on-line? I'd like to have a look and see how it
works, just to get started thinking about it already. The
coding won't be for a little while yet for this one, but I like
to start thinking about things well below I set down to type
in the code for it :-).

Thanks,

Robert

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@n...>
wrote:

> Maybe the best e-mail address for me is
> support@r...
> as that domain is hosted at my web host.

That's the one we used. It was over a year ago. Thanks for replying,
and I'm sure the fault does not lie with you!

> The other domains are currently hosted at another domain
> and are web cloaking ones with e-mail forwarding but I
> have never had any problems with those either yet...
> If it was that one then let me know and I'll tke it up
> with the company that forwards my e-mails for me.
>
> > One suggestion that immediately comes to mind, though you probably
> already have it, is to support different types of half-diminished
> seventh chord: in JI, you have 1/7:1/6:1/5:1/4, 5:6:7:9, and
> 10:12:15:17, and all are distinct and consistently represented in
72-
> equal.
>
> Oh right. I had been calling those mixed over / under chords.

I'm confused, especially after reading the rest of your message.
Which of the above would you call mixed over / under chords, and why?
Why do you think such chords are important?

> Is your paper on this available on-line?

Carl has two differently-formatted copies at

http://lumma.org/tuning/erlich/

If you have any spare time, I'd strongly encourage you to look at
_The Forms Of Tonality_

http://lumma.org/tuning/erlich/erlich-tFoT.pdf

as well.

> I'd like to have a look and see how it
> works, just to get started thinking about it already. The
> coding won't be for a little while yet for this one, but I like
> to start thinking about things well below I set down to type
> in the code for it :-).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert

Thanks to you, in advance, for making some making of music possible.