somewhat related: this paper describes the haskell innards of Chordify, a web service that annotates chord structures of songs from videos or sound clips
The reason i picked up the book: I was thinking whether it was possible to annotate just intonation from equal temperament, but I think that's a limitation of MIDI that it can't do that. Also, eagerly awaiting §11.4, "Soundness and Completeness of Music Algebras".
I recently attended an academic workshop on algorithmic music in Common Lisp and wrote some relevant code in Clojure while there. A lot of people there had strong music theory backgrounds and were very interested in both alternate tunings and the "set theory" approach to pitch sets.
The good news is that with Overtone (the Clojure interface to SuperCollider) you can specify individual pitches rather than MIDI note numbers. People at this workshop who wanted to work with pitch sets or unusual tunings had to resort to controlling the pitch bend programmatically, which, while it certainly works, involves a lot more effort and results in less elegant code.
I really like overtone and what people could do with it. I had it installed, but I gave up after I realized my emacs muscle memories had atrophied a bit too much. That said the constant development of supercollider has made it the preeminent music programming environment.
This book looks more like the start of the CSound manual. That said, awesome, but not where I would run to to get started making sounds.
Thx for info, I need to look at SuperCollider and chuck some day, I've heard a lot about both.
Also, I didn't know there was any way to systemically describe just intonation. I'm one of those bubble children that hears wolf intervals all the time and can never get a guitar tuned. I got that from having piano and woodwind lessons simultaneously as a kid
substitute "frequencies" for "pitches" in this sentence:
The good news is that with Overtone (the Clojure interface to SuperCollider) you can specify individual pitches rather than MIDI note numbers.
since you have access to the actual frequencies, you can build any arbitrary abstraction on top, including any tuning system known to humanity. (and since it's Clojure that abstraction can be unusually concise.)
I wish Overtone -- as someone who has no idea how to setup jackd with pulseaudio and SuperCollider -- was easier to jump straight into and play around.
http://ismir2012.ismir.net/event/papers/lbd2.pdf
http://chordify.net/pages/official-launch-of-chordify/
______________
The reason i picked up the book: I was thinking whether it was possible to annotate just intonation from equal temperament, but I think that's a limitation of MIDI that it can't do that. Also, eagerly awaiting §11.4, "Soundness and Completeness of Music Algebras".