[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.

  _______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC


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