Can Microtonal music support planned?

[torstenanders]

Dear developers,

Are you considering to support microtonal music at some stage? In particular, this would mean allowing for additional (or, even better, custom) accidentals in addition to the current b and s in the OMN language.

Quartertones are already supported even by MusicXML and out-of-the-box by standard music notation software like Finale and Sibelius, so adding at least those would be welcome. For example, some ASCII microtonal music notations use | for quarter tone sharp (meaning and arrow upwards) and ! for quarter tone flat, but other characters could be used as well, if that would cause problems for your parser. 

A consistent interpretation of enharmonic notation would be essential in this context as well, as a ds can be tuned differently to an eb (see my previous post). Doing so is possible even when translating pitches into integers (both for absolute pitches and pitch classes), if you go beyond 12 pitches per octave in the translation. For example, if you internally would use 31-tone equal temperament (meantone) then the standard pitch and pitch class arithmetic still works. For the conversion you simply do mod 31 instead of mod 12 for 12-tone equal temperament. 

I do not know what kind of abstraction layers you use internally in the functions for parsing, processing pitches etc. and how hard it would be to extend the software accordingly. With the right abstraction, however, it might be possible to have a single user-level setting to switch between such pitch representations (e.g., this is supported by my software Strasheela, http://strasheela.sourceforge.net, though Strasheela does not have your notation parsing layer). 

Are you considering to support microtonal notation at some stage?

Best,

Torsten Anders

--
http://www.torsten-anders.de

[opmo]

We can use microtones in Opusmodus but they are not a part of notation.

The microtonality need to work with OMN and MIDI. To implement true microtonal system we need to make first the split of midi changes to be able to play microtonal chords:

(q c4+f4- pp arco d4 e4+)

This is how the microtone will be coded in OMN.

The example above would need a minimum 2 midi channels.

[torstenanders]

Dear Janusz,

> This is how the microtone will be coded in OMN.

So, this is planned for future releases. Thanks! 

If you are interested, I am happy to be part of design discussions, as I implemented similar features (automatic microtonal playback and notation) myself before. 

> We can use microtones in Opusmodus but they are not a part of notation.

Yes, I understand that there is already some support of adding explicit tuning. However, from what I read so far, this is not integrated into the OMN language, and therefore the algorithmic potential of Opusmodus cannot be used. 

Best,

Torsten

--

http://www.torsten-anders.de

[opmo]

Thank you for the offer, I will let you know when we are close to the date (version 2.0).

If you have any specific ideas - must be part or the pitch notation c4 cs4 c4+ c4- c4++ but all this is not decided yet - please send them directly to me.