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Topic: Unequal temperaments (Read 4285 times) previous topic - next topic

Unequal temperaments

I have been reading Arthur Benade's book "Fundamentals of Musicaf Accoustics" recently. This contains an excellent discussion of the origins of various temperamants for the scale (hence my recent post re: G sharp or A flat!).

I would like to do some experiments using NWC to see how the different temperaments sound. Is it possible to set up a Midi device so that it is anything other than equal tempered?

Re: Unequal temperaments

Reply #1 –
You need to talk to a piano tuner. They know this stuff. Seriously, I don't know. If you retune your computer (can you do that?) it'ss just sound like a bad recording of the Handel Water Music.

Re: Unequal temperaments

Reply #2 –
Yes, you can retune devices. Lime did this rather well.
There are two ways of doing it, depending upon the midi device:
WARNING - VERY DENSE INFORMATION - PLEASE READ SLOWLY.

1) Use a multipoint controller before every note to adjust the pitch of the note correctly. This works for every midi device, and is doable in NWC, though EXTREMELY tedious.
2) Create a normal NWC file, export to midi, use another midi editor to create a keyboard mapping that tells the midi device to play - for example - Ab 10 cents sharper, Bb 15 cents flatter etc. This requires (a) a midi editor that can create such instructions, (b) a midi device that will execute such instructions (Yamaha do one, many "midi-workstations" will have it, most general midi devices WON'T!), (c) determination on your part to read the midi spec and get the instructions right; or (d) Lime (which unfortunately is free and buggy, or expensive).

Some workstations will let you arbitrarily assign ANY pitch to ANY note. eg if you wanted, you could reverse all the notes on the keyboard, or have 127 notes spanning only one octave, or even one semitone. This is extremely good fun, and interesting, but often not acceptable musically. :-)

I was very interested in temperaments at one stage, and documented my findings at:
http://www.tip.net.au/~apurdam/tempers.html
Drop in and have a look. It discusses very briefly some of the problems discussed by Brenade.

Andrew

Re: Unequal temperaments

Reply #3 –
Here is a tip that works for usual temperaments - I mean
when there are only 12 notes in an octave, and when any
octave is pure, whatever the other intervals are.

You compose your music normally using NoteWorthy. When it
is finished, you set the same midi channel for all staves
(if you have more than one) and you export it to a midi
file.

Then you read it with any MIDI sequencer (I use cakewalk
apprentice), and you copy/paste the result to other channels
using note filters. For instance, all the C go to channel 1,
all the C#/Db to channel 2, all the D to channel 3, etc.
Remember not to use drums channel! (usually channel 10).

Then you can change pitch bend for each channel. If you
don't know how to do it with the MIDI sequencer (or you
don't want to), you can reimport the result into NoteWorthy
and use multipoint controller.

The advantages of this method are:
- it is not very difficult to do it
- it will work with any general midi device
- it is better than a pitch bend for each note, because
it works even when you have chords

The drawbacks are:
- after transformation, the score is not very readable
- if you want to play several instruments, you need more
channels (12 per instrument if all 12 notes are used)

Olivier.

Re: Unequal temperaments

Reply #4 –
This is an involved task. First, get the free program CSound from http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Man/c_front.html
This program creates sound files (i.e. wavs) from music files. Also get the program midi2cs, which converts midi files to csound files. Then edit the file midi2cs.cps, which contains the tuning for each note, in cycles per second. Edit this file for the appropriate tuning to your other temperament.

Re: Unequal temperaments

Reply #5 –
This is a limitation on Olivier's solution (which is good enough in many cases, and really simple to execute).
You sometimes have in the same score C# and Db. In midi this will alas refer to the same data (tell me if I'm wrong). So you'll lose the difference (ask a violonist ;^)).

What would be great is to ask NWC to search for each occurence of C#, jump to it, add an MPC event that increases slightly the pitch (forget the chords then) before and get it normal after, and so on. The same with Db with an MPC which would decrease the pitch, ...
This is not possible *now*. NWC doesn't allow you to find whatever, quel dommage ! Let's dream a bit... :)

P.S. Purely musically speaking, in which temperaments xC is the same as natural D ?

NWCly yours