Does anyone know of any NWC files that use tunings other than Equal Temperament (Marpurg, Kirnberger, Pythagorean, etc.)?
I've searched the Forum and the Scriptorium, but my search skills must be somewhat lacking...
TIA
This is a shot-in-the-dark, but I think some of the Turkish music is noted in non-western scales. Look for things by E. iNANÇ.
I'm looking for Western music. Need to demonstrate, say, a Bach fugue (or some pre-Bach work) with a temperament other than Equal. I'm hoping to find something with "the wrong tuning" that I could then "fix" [no, I'm not prejudiced against unequal temperament...] so that the students can hear the difference. If the school had more pianos and more money, I could get my piano tuner to give me three (or more) different tunings, but alas, education doesn't receive enough government funding...
Have you tried Andrew Purdam's user tool to implement temperaments other than ET? I haven't tried it myself, but it looks as though it might be what you're looking for. In the Scripto at
http://nwc-scriptorium.org/nwc2scripts_temper.html (http://nwc-scriptorium.org/nwc2scripts_temper.html)
Cheers,
Bill
Kevin:
What soundcard do you use?
It is sometimes possible to adjust the pitch of each of the 12 tones.
Here is a list of cards capable of microtuning.
http://www.microtonal-synthesis.com/micro_af.html (http://www.microtonal-synthesis.com/micro_af.html)
You might also find this page useful:-
http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala/ (http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala/)
I haven't tried the software so I dont know if it works with NWC playback.
On the page there are links to information on various tunings.
Synthfont also provides the option to retune each of the 12 tones.
Click on the Options button near the playback buttons.
Many microtonal scale variations preset.
(This is probably the easiest method).
Barry Graham
Melbourne, Australia
At home, Audigy SE (but I don't know what I'll have at school).
Although I don't see it on list of cards capable of microtuning, I can do all sorts of pitch changes.
Will this make it portable (meaning can I play it on any of the computers at school [that we can't make changes to])?
Not unless you can install Synthfont...
I know it's only Western music you're looking for, but I am building quite a collection of Byzantine music that I am auto-magically (thanks to NoteWorthy version 2) transcribing from Byzantine psaltiki notation to Western notation. Almost all tunes require bent pitches, some requiring six or seven staves to implement this. These melodies sound wrong (and certainly not "Eastern"), if they are played with Western tuning. Let me know if you need any samples.
Kevin said:
No but you can save to an mp3 file (selectable bitrate) in Synthfont and save the file(s) to CD.
You may be quite interested in Ertuğrul İnanç's Turkish Music on the Scripto (http://nwc-scriptorium.org/ethnic.html#Turkish). Of course, you
could submit your collection of Byzantine music to the scripto, I'm sure it would be welcome... :-)
Perhaps you can get your hands on a Yamaha keyboard. I know that mine can be set to 6 or 7 different preset tunings including Pythagorean, Arabic, Werkmeister, Kirnberger, Pure major and minor... although I am not familiar with any music that requires these.
Well, thanks for all of the suggestions.
None of them work for my current situation though (it's complicated...).
I'll just have to retune a few files myself (if I can get them done in time).
Boy, that would be nice for some of my other situations...
This isn't an answer to your problem, but it seemed like the best place to post this as it is related.
I just found the following site:
http://www.io.com/~hmiller/music/warped-canon.html (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/music/warped-canon.html)
It has the Pachelbel canon as midi files in every tuning you can think of, plus others that you never would.
Enjoy?
PS: Looking around I found that nTET (e.g. 12TET) = n-tone equal temperament (12 tone being a diatonic scale). Perhaps known to most, but not to me.
Wow, that's pretty cool, thanks!
As you said, it isn't an answer to my problem, but we're gettin' close.
John Sankey recorded the complete keyboard works of Bach, Scarlatti and Byrd as MIDI files with period tunings. They can be downloaded as ZIP archives at:
http://www.sankey.ws/harpsichord.html (http://www.sankey.ws/harpsichord.html)
He used a scheme in which each of the 12 tones in an octave were on a separate MIDI channel with the appropriate microtonal adjustments for (I think) just intonation or perhaps mean-tone temperment. He recorded them on a Kawai keyboard and them remapped each pitch accordingly, so that all the Cs in all octaves mapped to their own channel, all the C#s to another channel, and so on. Probably capturing the MIDI setup data with MIDI-OX would reveal the tuning immediately, if that's the period tuning you're after.
That's pretty cool, too. Thanks.
This might be an answer to my problem, or at least it's close.
There's a lot of stuff to sort through...