[PD] Musical notation object on Pd
Mathieu Bouchard
matju at artengine.ca
Tue Nov 9 05:49:29 CET 2010
On Tue, 9 Nov 2010, João Pais wrote:
> in that case, I'll have little interest in your solution.
Hey, I'm making an abstraction, which you can modify to make it work the
way you want, and I promise to accept your version in GridFlow (though
perhaps under a different name). What's wrong with that ?
> I'm just alerting to what going on to this terrain might involve, as for
> long pitch hasn't been reduced to midi integers. like if someone
> releases an oscilator that doesn't accept values behind commas, no one
> will find it useful.
The analogy doesn't hold that much, because oscillators use non-integer
midi numbers a lot more often than a score needs to.
I'm not really against microtonal, I just don't use it by myself, and I
don't see myself using them anytime soon. I don't work in a music
department either.
> I'm saying to notate these things in the picture.
ok... hmmm... I may try something later, but you're still not telling me
how someone would pick a number of ± cents by clicking in a certain way
inside of the box. How would that happen ?
> you could display some of these with a cluster, indicating the top and
> bottom values, and the normal cluster line to notate it's a cluster.
A probability distribution is not just an interval, it's a likelihood
associated to each value. (Well, often a probability distribution isn't
even an interval, but that's another story)
> I have never seen a pitch as a complex number, but I don't really know
> what is a complex number,
I was more or less joking.
It's a math gimmick that was found to allow to shorten a lot of formulas,
apart from making them weirder. For example, a complex pitch is an
ordinary pitch and a decay speed (of the note's volume) expressed in the
same number (that's both a shortcut and something weird).
> I didn't have much math in high school.
When I was in school, complex numbers were generally avoided. Even in
grade 13 physics, were they'd have fitted well, they were avoided. I
had to wait till the mid year of a university degree to have a course on
them.
> as for the matrix, I guess the word you're looking for is "chord"? (or a
> cluster, which is a specific type of chord)
No, I'm not looking for a word. A matrix is another math gadget "bigger"
than a complex number, and sometimes you can do funny things with them. If
one made an oscillator whose pitch is a matrix, a single oscillator would
output several signals at once (!!!).
I mentioned those things because I was just guessing what kind of things
one could invent, which would make microtonality just not complete enough
anymore, so I picked a few things that a mathematician might be curious to
try.
But you can use complex numbers in pd already, using [fft~] or [cpole~]. I
made a song based on [cpole~] called I'm Just a Simple Pole in a Complex
Plane.
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| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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