One Laptop Per Child - capability to play microtonally?

I am interested in the possibility for enabling the musical part of this project to have microtonal keyboard capability.

Does anyone on the tuning list have knowledge, contacts, experience with this project?

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home

Any helpful thoughts appreciated as it seems to me that if we wish to influence future generations to play microtonal music, this might be a very useful vehicle and time for us to provide many alternative keyboard layouts for various microtonal systems.

I imagine various edo's, meantone, JI, and all the other wild and wonderful tuning systems that are out there could be made freely available and capable of using scala and other tuning tables for the new musicians to play with.

Maybe the keyboard mappings could also be included in the various tuning specs as a "package" e.g. for 53 notes per octave, various optimal 53 per octave keyboard layouts could be loaded to the machine as part of the tuning tables.

I realise that this is going to bring up all the old hexagon versus diamond versus alpha discussions, yet if we who are already producing microtonal music don't start think about it pronto,

we could end up with the "stick in the mud" 12 edo traditionalists and academics feeding all the old paradoxical music theory and 12edo chauvinisms into another generation of new musicians.

Thoughts, ideas to the list please.

Charles Lucy
lucy@...

- Promoting global harmony through LucyTuning -

for information on LucyTuning go to:
http://www.lucytune.com

For LucyTuned Lullabies go to:
http://www.lullabies.co.uk

It's been a while since I looked at this project, and the specs might
have changed, but from what I remember it runs its own proprietary
linux kernel and at one point was going to be powered by "hand crank,"
although from a brief glance at the website it seems like that has
changed. There is some music software for it which is mainly powered
by CSound, and none of it looks incredibly well-done just yet.
However, since the main audio engine for the OS is in fact CSound, and
since CSound is apparently often used for microtonal composition, I
think that it might pretty easy to implement some kind of scala file
plugin for it. There is also supposed to be some kind of emphasis on
networking in the system, so group improvisation or composition might
see its way into the project into the future.

-Mike

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Charles Lucy <lucy@...> wrote:
> I am interested in the possibility for enabling the musical part of
> this project to have microtonal keyboard capability.
>
> Does anyone on the tuning list have knowledge, contacts, experience
> with this project?
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home
>
> Any helpful thoughts appreciated as it seems to me that if we wish to
> influence future generations to play microtonal music, this might be a
> very useful vehicle and time for us to provide many alternative
> keyboard layouts for various microtonal systems.
>
> I imagine various edo's, meantone, JI, and all the other wild and
> wonderful tuning systems that are out there could be made freely
> available and capable of using scala and other tuning tables for the
> new musicians to play with.
>
> Maybe the keyboard mappings could also be included in the various
> tuning specs as a "package" e.g. for 53 notes per octave, various
> optimal 53 per octave keyboard layouts could be loaded to the machine
> as part of the tuning tables.
>
> I realise that this is going to bring up all the old hexagon versus
> diamond versus alpha discussions, yet if we who are already producing
> microtonal music don't start think about it pronto,
>
> we could end up with the "stick in the mud" 12 edo traditionalists and
> academics feeding all the old paradoxical music theory and 12edo
> chauvinisms into another generation of new musicians.
>
> Thoughts, ideas to the list please.
>
> Charles Lucy
> lucy@...
>
> - Promoting global harmony through LucyTuning -
>
> for information on LucyTuning go to:
> http://www.lucytune.com
>
> For LucyTuned Lullabies go to:
> http://www.lullabies.co.uk
>
>

Mike Battaglia wrote:
> It's been a while since I looked at this project, and the specs might
> have changed, but from what I remember it runs its own proprietary
> linux kernel and at one point was going to be powered by "hand crank,"
> although from a brief glance at the website it seems like that has
> changed. There is some music software for it which is mainly powered
> by CSound, and none of it looks incredibly well-done just yet.
> However, since the main audio engine for the OS is in fact CSound, and
> since CSound is apparently often used for microtonal composition, I
> think that it might pretty easy to implement some kind of scala file
> plugin for it. There is also supposed to be some kind of emphasis on
> networking in the system, so group improvisation or composition might
> see its way into the project into the future.

It runs a Linux kernel. I don't know how a Linux kernel can be proprietary. It also has its own GUI which you can run on a standard Linux kernel and is in the Debian repositories.

Yes, it uses Csound. The description's here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound

Why do you want a Scala file plug-in? Csound's pitch support is much more flexible than what Scala files provide.

The application for children is here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TamTam

I can't find any mention of the standard tuning. As the target instruments from (among other countries) Nigeria and Thailand, we shouldn't assume equal temperament. If they use it anyway, no problem, you can go in and change the Csound orchestras.

It does, indeed, have an unfinished look and they're working on group improvisations.

Most significantly for the microtonal community, the OLPC project has given us a Csound sample library:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples

Prent said on MMM (I think) that this is all microtonal friendly. And, indeed, I've heard that the Csound that the XO ships with doesn't include the Fluid opcodes, which handle SoundFonts in an evil, not-easily-microtunable way. That means anything it can do must be tunable.

This is an excellent resource for all those microtonalists who weren't using Csound before because it didn't have a standard instrument library.

Graham