[chuck-users] Keyboard Stuff

Kassen signal.automatique at gmail.com
Fri Apr 17 14:45:18 EDT 2009


Hans;

The methods are similar, but the cause different: Scala needs a lot of MIDI
> channels for the microtonality (and by default uses all but one). So when
> playing on the layout I gave, one uses several different channels (or so is
> my impression).
>
>
Ah, I get it. In this case though we are dealing with input from the
computer keyboard which we send internally to a set of voices in ChucK so we
aren't limited by MIDI's rather out-dated concepts.

What we do need is some way to translate key numbers to pitches. I'd do that
with a simple array of floats mapping key-numbers to pitches. I'd likely
deal with pitchbend using some sort of scaling on those values, if I needed
pitchbend, that could then get rid of any issues arising from non-equal
spacing between notes.

To clarify; what is interesting about the polyphonic examples in the MIDI
dir is how they deal with polyphony, not the MIDI as such.

>From your other mail;

> It strikes me that Chuck may not be good for mixing key numbers with the
translated "AsCII" numbers. Ir seems one has to make choice of what to use.
When mixing, one may want to pick up the event first and looking at both the
key and the (eventual) Unicode number.

Well, both methods can be used in a single set of keyboard parsing rules
though that would mean that we'd need to make sure we0re not mixing up all
the numbers that will be flying around. We might, for example, look at the
key number only when there is no character associated with the key that was
pressed, for example. Many other strategies are possible.

ChucK may be build on decades of knowledge about sound and computation but
sadly we are also stuck with decades of legacy and semi-standards that
occasionally make our life more annoying than it would ideally be.
Personally I hate writing tens if not hundreds of lines parsing the keyboard
because it's so boring and there are so many nearly random numbers yet it
all needs to be exactly right. I'm terribly sorry but I don't think there is
anything I can do for you there aside from showing understanding.

Yours,
Kas.
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