Hello guys. I've been dreaming about an object that would display musical notation and output data (like midi numbers for instance). I found a discutions about something like that here in our list ( http://www.mail-archive.com/pd-list@iem.at/msg19969.html) but this was a discussion about creating live musical notation for performance, and what I have in mind is something more like a Computer Assisted Composition/Research tool. If i'm not mistaken Open Music and PWGL (http://www2.siba.fi/PWGL/) already have something like this. Look at the images I made of how this object would look like:
- The input would be a message with the midi number of the pitch, and the
object would display a Treble or Bass cleff with the note and output the number of the pitch through the outlet (cleff_pd_01.png).
- It would be possible to alterate the pitch by holding and dragging the
mouse (cleff_pd_02.png)
- Chords could be made... (cleff_pd_03.png)
- or melodies... (cleff_pd_04.png)
- or even sequences of chords. (cleff_pd_05.png)
The output could easily be transformed into notation for lilypond, for instance (like Collin Oldham did in that thread I mentioned).
Do you think it's possible to do something like that? At the moment I don't have the money to pay a programmer to do that (I would happily do it if I could). Maybe I can learn how to do this, but I don't know where to start. I already see some complications to build this object:
- it would have to stretch itself so the chords and melodies would fit;
- It would have to decide what cleff to use (or maybe not, the user could
send a message like [treble<);
- There should have a way to choose between flat and sharp;
- A nice thing would be to have more than one staff at once, like a piano
staff for instance, and so on...
For now I'm just wondering if something like this could be done. I've been doing some calculations of composition techniques using Pd and I miss musical notation so much.
Bye! Caio Barros
Bonus: I made an abstraction to transform midi note to pitch name and also frequency as a part of a bunch of composition tools I use. (and after I read those threads about creating the notation object in GEM I discovered that some people already did it, but here it go anyway). see midi_note.pd
