Forum Archive

Forum

Software: Tuning

Most Recent

written by: john

Hi Stephen

You've touched on three things here - general master tuning (the ability to move the fundamental frequency reference of all the music you play), just tempered tunings and the representation of frequencies as integers.

The first point, master tuning, is not yet supported in EigenD. I wish I could say that this was for some profound reason, but it's really that we just forgot. It is needed for a wide varieties of reasons, not just for circumstances in which one wishes to play Baroque music, and is on our feature queue as we speak. Unfortunately it is not entirely trivial to add as EigenD is a fully distributed system and this makes such central adjustments a little more complicated, but it will get done during 2010. When it does get done, you will be able to adjust the main A from 440 to 10 or 20,000 Hz if you want.

The second point, the availability of just temperament, is more complex. You can in fact already define scales off the normal even tempered frequencies, using the 'user scales' file (which is in floating point numbers or cents, so you can go as weird as you like, which is point 3). You are correct in saying that many of the scales defined in our scale manager were originally played in just temper or some variant thereof, but nearly everyone today will be playing alongside a piano, or a MIDI/AU instrument. These are nearly always tuned to even temper, and we decided that this had to be the default case for all our standard scales, and we therefore used it as the 'note center' for our internal representation of semitones. The Eigenharp was designed from the ground up to support different tunings on scales though, so you can define scales to suit yourself, and it is possible in theory and I suspect with quite a bit of practice, to play off the defined scale by using the ability of the keys to bend the notes. The easiest way right now though is just to define the tuning you want in a User Scale,.

The optimal thing for allowing various tempers would be to add a 'scale modifier' to the Scaler (the Agent that adds the frequencies to the notes) that would allow one to define variants on existing scales, such as 'even' and 'just'. We plan to do some work on the Scaler next year (so that it supports step changes around the base notes for each scale, in the manner a concert harp does with its pedals, allowing one to have accidentals when in a scale by using footswitches or modifier keys) and adding a temper modifier at the same time is a strong possibility. I personally love to hear music played when freed from even temper, and making this easier for people (and therefore more likely to start cropping up in modern music) is attractive..

John

written by: stephen

Tue, 8 Dec 2009 23:21:55 +0000 GMT

Hi, I need to start by declaring my colours: I'm not a musician, I'm a mathematician and computer scientist. But my mum has opera training and I was subjected to some music theory here and there.

I've been looking at the booklet for the Pico and working my way through the tutorials, and I'm startled to discover that (a) the key control page has no setting for the pitch standard (Wikipedia leads me to expect that I should be able to choose at least between A440, A442 and A445, even if nobody yet plays Baroque music on an Eigenharp (but why not?)).

Secondly and relatedly, I was rather startled to see in the scale browser that all the scales except the seventeen tone scale are given (or maybe it's a UI problem? Maybe they only appear to be integers? But no, some of them don't sound how I expect them to) as integral logarithmic values, making them subsets of the equally tempered twelve note scale. This can't be right -- many (most?) of these scales predate equal temper and were designed to have certain perfect harmonic relationships (that is, they lie in the linear, not logarithmic, frequency domain)!

Anyway, maybe I'm just confused and this stuff is in there somewhere I haven't found. But if it isn't, might I suggest (a) adding A440/A442/A445/custom tuning to the unused keys at the bottom of the pico's key control page, and (b) either stealing a key or perhaps making use of a 'bend' direction to allow toggling between 'true' scales (with ratios of small integers in the linear frequency space) and 'mean' scales (with ratios of small integers in the log frequency space) - the former making highly trained vocalists and ancient music types happy, the latter for when there's a pianist in the band - while allowing common nomenclature for the key layouts (an equally important factor in the Eigenharp design). (This would mean that there would be not one but two relative pitch lists for each named scale in the database.)

Then sell them to music schools, you know. A universal ancient instrument! Genius!


written by: john

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 08:51:59 +0000 GMT

Hi Stephen

You've touched on three things here - general master tuning (the ability to move the fundamental frequency reference of all the music you play), just tempered tunings and the representation of frequencies as integers.

The first point, master tuning, is not yet supported in EigenD. I wish I could say that this was for some profound reason, but it's really that we just forgot. It is needed for a wide varieties of reasons, not just for circumstances in which one wishes to play Baroque music, and is on our feature queue as we speak. Unfortunately it is not entirely trivial to add as EigenD is a fully distributed system and this makes such central adjustments a little more complicated, but it will get done during 2010. When it does get done, you will be able to adjust the main A from 440 to 10 or 20,000 Hz if you want.

The second point, the availability of just temperament, is more complex. You can in fact already define scales off the normal even tempered frequencies, using the 'user scales' file (which is in floating point numbers or cents, so you can go as weird as you like, which is point 3). You are correct in saying that many of the scales defined in our scale manager were originally played in just temper or some variant thereof, but nearly everyone today will be playing alongside a piano, or a MIDI/AU instrument. These are nearly always tuned to even temper, and we decided that this had to be the default case for all our standard scales, and we therefore used it as the 'note center' for our internal representation of semitones. The Eigenharp was designed from the ground up to support different tunings on scales though, so you can define scales to suit yourself, and it is possible in theory and I suspect with quite a bit of practice, to play off the defined scale by using the ability of the keys to bend the notes. The easiest way right now though is just to define the tuning you want in a User Scale,.

The optimal thing for allowing various tempers would be to add a 'scale modifier' to the Scaler (the Agent that adds the frequencies to the notes) that would allow one to define variants on existing scales, such as 'even' and 'just'. We plan to do some work on the Scaler next year (so that it supports step changes around the base notes for each scale, in the manner a concert harp does with its pedals, allowing one to have accidentals when in a scale by using footswitches or modifier keys) and adding a temper modifier at the same time is a strong possibility. I personally love to hear music played when freed from even temper, and making this easier for people (and therefore more likely to start cropping up in modern music) is attractive..

John



Please log in to join the discussions