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Re: Soundnote, musical instruments playing at arbitrary pitch

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg89192] Re: Soundnote, musical instruments playing at arbitrary pitch
• From: "Hans Michel" <hmichel at cox.net>
• Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 07:02:01 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <g1gqj6$1fq$1@smc.vnet.net>

Janos:

In private communication you stated that you want to experiment with 
something like
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/PythagoreanMeantoneAndEqualTemperamentMusicalScales/

but with MIDI.

At first I was hesitant to offer any ideas since it involves lots of time 
and the proper equiment (soundcard or MIDI controller.) This all assumes 
that the java MIDI driver has access to the sound cards MIDI banks. If it 
does not then you should look into

http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/sound/soundbanks.html

If there is no java MIDI banks available the driver will try to find what is 
available on your sound card. At which point this path may work for you:

If you have a sound card that can take SoundFont; you can fill the memory 
banks of your sound card (really using memory from your system). Properly 
configured these sample sounds can be accessed in Mathematica using 
SoundNote's function Style property. The style can take as document states 
"Style {bank, patch, s} represents an instrument in the specified bank and 
patch"  and s between 1 and 128 represents of that bank. So this will no 
longer be General MIDI instruments but sampled sounds or other MIDI 
instruments that you placed in those banks.

This all depends on the hard ware you have.

On a PC with Creative compatible sound card there is software available to 
load sample sound in the SoundFont format (by all means this is not the only 
format for sampled sound) But see

http://www.soundblaster.com/soundfont/downloads.asp

Now you can save a sample of a particular midi note instrument say "Violin" 
and convert to .wav or .aif. Now if you process this wav file to change its 
properties to your liking and load it into a MIDI bank and patch. If you 
specify that sound bank and patch you should hear back the sampled sound.

For that matter you can sample your voice load it into a MIDI bank and patch 
and play it back
with SoundNote function in any MIDI Key.

If your limited to what the Java synthesizer is capable of then I would look 
into modifying the Java Synthesizer.

Hans

"janos" <janostothmeister at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:g1gqj6$1fq$1 at smc.vnet.net...
> SoundNote["G", 1, "Violin"] gives you a middle G as if performed by a
> violinist corresponding to a predefined scale (should I know which?)
> It does not accept real numbers as a second variable.
> Play can play you any waveform.
>
> I would like to have the, say, violin profile but play a sound note at
> arbitrary pitch.
> How can I do this? The FullForm of SoundNote gives no information,
> and I do not want to invest a large amount of work into creating the
> appropriate profile if it has been done once.
>
> Could anyone help me please?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Janos
>