Hi Tony
To answer your question about having a sharpen/flatten ability tied to a pair of keys, this is not possible as yet. There is a planned feature that will make this possible as a side effect, that of adding modifiers to scales and the Scaler (the Agent that adds frequencies to a group of keys). This is a much more general solution than just adding a semitone up/down option (which may not really be that meaningful in a lot of scales) in which each interval in a scale is accompanied by defined offsets, up and down, that can be activated using modifier keys. If you want to see a system like this in operation, take a look at a concert harp. These are tuned to a diatonic scale, with each interval being tunable up of down by a semitone using footpedals. This enables extensive chromatic playing whilst still gaining the interval advantages of using scales. In the EigenD system this is particularly important as scales can be quite strange. It is a well defined feature request ticket in our queue and will get done sometime in 2010 - its been wanted for some time by quite a few people, me included.
In response to your comments regarding the GUI, you are quite correct, it is just a matter of software, but like everything else in music, there is rather more to the problem than meets the eye. The underlying method of configuration and control in EigenD is a command language, Belcanto. Using it in a scripted manner is a new development for us, and I think that it will provide a nice bridge between beginners and more advanced usage in time, as well as allowing some quite esoteric configuration changes to be implemented quite quickly on the fly, things that take a while at the moment. Normally (and our two longest players, Dave and Sam are now wizards at this) its all done interactively, playing on the Eigenharp itself.
Using a GUI to attach things to keys in the manner you describe doesn't actually make much sense in our world. It looks like it will, to a limited extent, on the Pico, but on an Alpha, ith multiple layers of Keygroup switching, it wouldn't make any sense. Keys are not actually that important in one sense, they are just a source of playing data, and can be moved around and replumbed extensively using Belcanto.
At the moment we have quite a number of engineers playing Pico's and a lot of people are commenting that it seems it would be easy to make a point and click GUI program to control and configure things. I suspect that is because we have so far been very opaque about the insides of EigenD, its design objectives and it's guiding principles. This has made many of the ways Pico Factory Setup 1 works seem bizarre, even slightly baroque. Several people (those that came to our last London get together) did have a brief glimpse 'under the hood' from Dave, and they have a rather clearer idea of what we are really aiming at, which is to give an awful lot of the configuration and control that we programmers normally exercise on behalf of the musician back to the musician. This has made a system that is very, very different from any existing DAW. It's a highly distributed, agent based, network transparent system, for those who know what that is. Quite a few people, the tech savvy who know what a DAW looks like, think that controlling this linguistically is a bit bonkers and we should build a nice slick GUI to let people do this. I would agree entirely with this point of view if I had not watched our earliest players get to grips with our approach and start to master it. Like many difficult skills, once mastered it gives the user a whole new way of working and thinking. To my mind, that is part of our job as the creators of a new instrument. It is a fundamental part of what makes it interesting, challenging and inspiring. Potentially Belcanto represents a completely new way to express oneself musically.
Of course, the biggest issue we face, as many have pointed out, is that we need to make the learning and adoption curve shallower towards this. This is going to be one of the biggest efforts we make through 2010, starting with a browsable scripting interface (working in early test already, i think Jim is planning to create the first 1.1 candidate on the unstable branch very shortly - it will be available to download and try). I suspect that anyone who can use a text editor is going to have some fun with that, and we're going to make an effort to get Belcanto documented during Q1/2 to help with that. Al is also working on an actual Belcanto command line app, for those that want to work as Dave does and start to try Belcanto interactively for real. This is also nearly ready for an unstable release, I believe. After that we're going to bring in a point and click program (currently named Workbench) that allows plumbing and value setting between Agents. This is going to take a little longer than we thought I suspect, like every GUI program. It's not getting it working (we already have a kind of Workbench that we use internally, as some have seen) but making it look pretty. The curse of making several thousand little connections/wires look ok and make sense, it's not terribly easy - there are around 500 running agents in the little Pico setup and who knows how many connections. You are absolutely right about how it will work though, it'll execute Belcanto when you click on things..
I hope that explains a few things. I'm sorry that some of these things have not yet appeared, we really wanted scripting out before Christmas, but we've been working hard on stability to the detriment of new features in the last month or so.
John
UK
