[OSC_dev] OSC replacement for MIDI

[Gaspard Bucher]

When I ta

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Jeff Glatt <jgglatt at roadrunner.com> wrote:
>> I am a musician
>
> Me too. I gig professionally every week (and I'm doing 2 gigs today, in
> fact).
> I mostly do solo work, but have also worked with a number of other
> musicians.
>
>> found myself coding using midi note numbers in scripts
>> for repetitive music.
>
> Yeah, I've done that too (well, not repetitive music because that stuff
> bores me to tears -- but in trying to replicate more "adventurous" music
> that sounds like it was played by human musicians), because I'm also a
> programmer. But out of the many musicians I've worked with, an
> incredibly, incredibly small percentage work with any sort of "music
> programming language".
>
> The vast majority of musicians don't "script" music. They "play" it, via
> a traditional musical instrument. That's not to say that it's "wrong" or
> "bad" to "script music". That's just to say that, when you design a tool
> like that, then you're not designing it for the vast majority of musicians
> to use. Nothing wrong with that. But I'm talking about something that
> is going to be useful to most musicians. And that means a user
> interface that doesn't show frequency nor cents nor any other
> "scientific" representation of pitch, but rather, uses standard note
> names like A4 or presents notes drawn upon manuscript. (And frankly,
> you'd be surprised how many musicians don't even read manuscript.
> So you _must_ be able to tell them the note name).
>
> For example, a musician using a sequencer program such as Cakewalk
> or Cubase will typically use the manuscript display to edit music. But even
> the alternative displays such as the event list, or piano roll, don't show
> MIDI note numbers. They show note name.
>
>>  "60" means nothing, but is learnable
>
> If I told a musician to play MIDI Note Number 60, most of them would
> look at me like I was crazy. If I told them to play a pitch that's 100 cents
> above middle C, the typical reply would be "What??? You mean I'm
> getting paid a dollar for each note I play on this gig??".
>
> It's either note name, or you hand them a manuscript if they read music.
>
>> "60.5" is a quarter tone, that's easy too
>
> What??? I've never heard a musician refer to a quarter note as 60.5.
>
>> 234.7 438.9 will never mean anything useful in musical terms
>
> Well, it _does_ mean something very, very useful in musical terms. It's
> just that a typical musician doesn't know what you're talking about.
>
>> it's not at all backward compatible.
>
> Huh??? How can you have a pitch that doesn't have a frequency?? The
> frequency _is_ the single thing that ties all tuning methods, and forms of
> music, together. Nothing else does. (ie, Cents are really meant to be used
> with a 12 tone western scale -- not non-western scales).
>
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>
When I talk about "backward compatibility" I mean it in the field
where a midi replacement would be used: to connect a "control device"
(keyboard, controller) to an "instrument" (live, logic, reason,
max/msp, supercollider, etc). In this context, notes represented as
floats (60, 59.9804) are much closer to what the previous generation
of these controllers were doing then raw frequencies so the adaptation
to current hardware would be lightweight.

G.