Re: lilypond ./VERSION ./ChangeLog lily/midi-item.cc

[Heikki Johannes Junes]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Juergen Reuter wrote:

> No, I think this will not work properly.
>
> The problem with the above approach is that it works only for monophonic
> channels. (...)

Of course this is experimental and a user who uses these quarter tones
makes it at their own risk. Currently, midi is produced for some monophonic
instruments, for example quartertone flutes. Anyway, in paper, microtonal
polyphony works more smootly.

Even the new specification of midi at

  http://www.midi.org/about-midi/gm/gm2_spec.shtml

states only commands for Master/Channel Fine/Coarse tuning, which means
that the tunings of the tones in a polyphonic channel cannot be controlled
separately.

> One "solution" is to half the number of channels. (...)
>
> The major drawback of this approach obviously is that you reduce the
> number of effectively availble channels from 16 to 8.
>
> Greetings,
> Juergen

Indeed, one could maybe solve this safely just by placing the quarter tones
in a separate channel. However, in future at some point, there may be also
the twelfth tones. Then one may be totally lost with this kind of
splitting. Should one split a twelfth tone polyphonic channel to six
channels?

Seems like here the ordinary MIDI specification is not complete and one
could potentially consider porting audio also to some other format, for
example to csound which gives more control on the tones produced.

Greetings,

  Heikki Junes