[Denemo-devel] A(nother) Good Idea

[Richard Shann]

When entering notes from the MIDI keyboard you need to say whether you
want sharps or flats, or even double sharp/flat. You can do this at the
moment by clicking on the Sharpen/Flatten buttons in the control panel.
This chooses a set of (double)sharp/flats based on the conventional key
system.
When you select one of these, you have only visual feedback about your
selection. The set of selected note names changes, with the flattest and
sharpest highlighted, so that you can see whether you have, say Eb-G# or
Bb-D# or ... 
We could arrange to output some audio marker to indicate what you have
done - even just a high note to indicate having gone sharper and a low
note to indicate having gone flatter would help. But with the portaudio
output we can do much better. 
 It has occurred to me that one of the benefits of using direct audio
output is that we are not restricted to midi messages, it is just as
easy to output samples of speech - so when you select Eb a ghostly voice
could say Eb (or si-bemol or whatever), at basically no extra cost to
the complexity of Denemo. All we would need is some small pcm samples
for the note names and the words flat sharp and double which are easy to
generate.
This isn't just a gimmick: my MIDI keyboard has two nice fat controllers
at the side which I could easily tweak to perform the enharmonic shift
without taking my eyes off the music I am reading - as long as I got
clear feedback as to the which was my flattest/sharpest note as a result
I could continue entering notes with confidence.  And *without* taking
my eyes from the music I am transcribing, which is currently the most
problematic part of transcription, losing your place.
I guess there will be other users who will find other reasons to exploit
the pcm audio output.

Richard