Fw: Hardware or software microtonals -- what should I do next?

> Hi again tuners.
>
> Recently, the school where I study has launched some sort of a research > centre and new people have come to be involved in that. Some of them are > fairly experienced in the field of acoustics and I managed to get in > contact with them. While discussing possible software/hardware equipment, > we were also bringing up the question of finding an interactive way to use > alternative tunings with the help of Scala for the purpose of music > composition. The question now is whether to go for a hardware solution or > a software one. What is needed is basically the possibility to make a few > calculations which result in a scale and then be able to load Scala's > output to a device playable with a keyboard. Someone suggested using > Absynth since one of the computers in one classroom there has a MIDI > keyboard attached to it. The reason why I'm sceptical about Absynth is > that before you can play the scale, you have to 1) make a ".gly" file, 2) > copy it into Absynth's tuning folder (which resides pretty down there > somewhere in a deep subdirectory), 3) restart Absynth, 4) find and load > the scale. This takes so much time that I would first have to do this for > all the scales I intend to use for explaining a topic before starting with > the explanation, which strips me of the possibility to interactively play > scales that come to my mind during my speech as a result of my instant > thoughts -- I really can't know in advance about all possible scales which > I'll wish to use during a presentation or something. Someone else > suggested loading a VST instrument into Cubase as some of them support > MTS. But the problem there is that that forces you to create a new track > each time you want to change the tuning, which, again, adds time to the > preceding step of first converting it to MTS. Honestly, I don't mind about > converting it to any format that Scala supports (be it MTS or ".gly" or > whatever out of the 100-something options) but I would like to find a > solution where there would be no more other major time taking steps than > the conversion. That's why I was also thinking about possibly using a > hardware "workstation" which might be connected to the MIDI interface of > the PC and receive retuning commands directly from Scala. However, this > choice raises two issues. One is that I have absolutely no idea about the > various tuning limitations of todays instruments and I don't know where to > learn something about them. Another is that if it were a new instrument > which Manuel doesn't know about, we would need a thorough description of > the format of the tuning messages to be sent to the instrument. A few > years ago, I swapped a couple of letters with Daniel Forrďż˝ asking him what > he could tell me about retuning the Korg PA instruments via MIDI. IIRC > (correct me if I'm wrong, Daniel), he answered that the documentation > didn't say anything about MIDI implementation and that even some people > who allegedly were in closer contact with the company didn't have any > papers concerning MIDI implementation. The same seemed to be the case with > the older sampler of Emu ESI-32. This surprises me a lot, considering the > fact that Yamaha, as part of the documentation for their XG instruments > back in the 90s, was giving a very detailed description of almost every > possible SysEx message you could think of, which later allowed me to write > a small QBasic utility for converting plain text numbers to XG tuning > files. But if Korg or Emu don't allow us to retune their "synths" in any > other way than manually on the pannel, then I just absolutely don't have > anything to suggest to Manuel for possibly improving Scala.
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> Any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance.
>
> Petr
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