Re: Pitch bend output in MIDI

[mclaren]

This Lilypond code might help. I write microtonal music all the time, so I've
paid close attention to the features of Lilypond that allow pitch bend to
create alternate pitches outside of 12 equal tuning:

http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/Microtonal-Helmholtz-Ellis-notation-in-Lilypond-fine-tuning-td51110.html

The poster does mention that he had to use a different font than the
standard Lilypond notational font, and apparently that requires a recompile
of Lilypond.  Unfortunately the font this guy used was hosted at a server at
CalArts that no longer exists.  However, he uses a music function
\accidental that expects a markup and then sends a pitch-bend along with the
note. You could probably just use the built-in makam microtonal accidentals
for the markup part, redefining the meaning of the makam accidentals. For
example, there's no reason why you couldn't use makam accidentals to
represents pitches of the 19 equal tuning, or the 22 equal tuning, or pelog,
or slendro, or some just intonation tuning. The makam accidentals do give
you 21 pitches to the octave -- natural plus semisharps and semiflats. If
you redefine the conventional sharp and flat symbols, you get 35 pitches to
the octave.

This Lilypond snippet does something similar but does not apparently require
additional fonts:
http://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=786

Using pitch-bends to get microtonal pitches in Lilypond is not ideal,
because Lilypond resets the pitch-bend at the end of each note, while the
decay is still sounding. This produces some ugly-sounding results. 

See here:
http://x31eq.com/lilypond/

So unfortunately the best way to get alternative tunings is still to use a
microtunable synthesizer and then a score that represents the notes as the
MIDI notes played, not the pitches heard. That's obviously a bad idea for an
analysis score. 

This GitHub package by Graham Breed adds microtonal support for Lilypond via
the Saggital or Extended Helmholtz-Ellis notation. The GitHub repository
docs include a working link to the Helmholtz-Ellis font (it may be same one
mentioned in the CalArts dead link above). 

https://github.com/lyp-packages/microlily

Breed knows his stuff, so this one will probably work best for you. 





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