written by: TomSwirly
Very well reasoned, I thought as much.Wow, this is very exciting. You folks are ploughing ahead at an amazing clip.
The microtonal scales is a great step forward. How are you achieving it? In particular, is there a way to make this work for MIDI instruments? (By say, sending a pitch bend and a note - or a tuning table?)
Hi Tom
Unfortunately the very nature of the ancient MIDI protocol make this pretty impossible. All frequencies in EigenD are 32bit floating point numbers, so this kind of thing is easy for us, but translating that into 7 bit (or even 14 bit controller) values doesn't really work. It may be possible to define particular AU setups that make it sort of work, but your results will be very variable and I suspect not very good. MIDI (and AU's are really still MIDI instruments) doesn't even have a pitchbend per note, as it doesn't really contain the idea of a note. We try to finagle this by using a MIDI channel for every new note, but even this is a moving target as it's down to the MIDI/AU instrument as to exactly what its pitchbend range will be on a given channel, and a surprising number of Au's don't handle this well even then.
We definitely need more native EigenD instruments! I'm going to be spending a significant part of 2010 talking AU instrument vendors into this, I suspect.
John
Very well reasoned, I thought as much.
Just as well, MIDI was getting a little old in the tooth. 7 bits is almost enough but definitely not enough.
However, MIDI does so have the idea of pitch-bend per note - sorta. That's what polyphonic aftertouch is for! :-D
(sorta kidding here. More or less, only Kurzweil instruments support poly aftertouch reception really well... they also support key release velocity too FYI....)
Please log in to join the discussions
UK
