[Haskell-cafe] Haskore microtonal support

[Magnus Jonsson]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Henning Thielemann wrote:

>
> On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Magnus Jonsson wrote:
>
>>
>> Now even more interestingly, my program also deals with music! :) I'm
>> generating microtonal midi files. I use it for very much the same purpose as
>> you do (although my program is not yet finished).
>
> Is it something we could and should add to Haskore?

If Haskore could support microtones that would make this world a slightly 
better world for me. Here are the basic things you need to support 
microtonal music:

- Pitch representations would have to be able to express any pitch.
   - One appealing approach is to represent a pitch directly as it's 
frequency.
   - Probably the most useful representation though is a base pitch,
     say one of C,D,E,F,G,A,B, followed by a list of accidentals that
     modify the pitch. The user should be able to define his own base
     pitches and accidentals, in terms of cents or frequency ratios or
     something similar.
- Generating microtonal midi files requires that you add pitch-bend 
messages before all notes. That restricts each midi channel to only being 
able to play one note at a time. This is a big deficiency in the midi 
protocol imo.

/ Magnus