ksr

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
92
Submissions
51
Member since
Feb 12
Watching Rome burn and cheering.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
I think there are many options between music streaming and reverting to 70s technology for music discovery.

As an avid listener, I've been assiduously building a digital music library since the year 2000. I started buying physical CDs, mostly used and in bulk, only to find that they are an impossibly huge burden when moving countries, which I did twice in the intervening years. I slowly moved to digital by ripping everything I could lay my hands on to FLAC, doing my best to scan all the booklets into PDF along the way. I believe I'm mostly done with my local public library's CD stock - at least for the music that interests me. I dig deep in so-called world music and large collections like magazine compilations. I usually collect whole series and I have a soft spot for cover versions of important composers.

To host all this (around 10TB today), I am running a Synology server and I'm backing up the whole thing to Backblaze. Synology has helpful apps for all platforms that allow connecting and listening to the music. I am using an old tablet as music player, connected to portable speakers around the house. It works great!

It's been my pleasure to share music discoveries with my friends and family. What's missing is a very good way to navigate this massive library in the many dimensions of the music universe.

Comment · 9 months ago
Asking here because I'm lazy to do my own research:

Are there music players that allow searching by credit? E.g. albums produced by Rick Rubin, or tracks where Justin Adams plays guitar. This kind of information is usually available on Discogs or MusicBrainz.

Comment · 9 months ago
Will keep an eye, thanks!
Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
Location: Vancouver, BC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Web Audio, Web MIDI, MusicXML, C++, Emscripten, TypeScript and the full Web stack

Résumé/CV: https://blog.karimratib.me/assets/CV-KarimRATIB.pdf

Email: [email protected]

I want to be hired to build Web-based music applications. I have very good experience in this domain, currently working on extending the open source music engraving engine Verovio with support for microtonality and better MusicXML import.

See my work at https://blog.karimratib.me/

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
1. Regarding naming of intervals, this has confused me for months, until I understood (or convinced myself) that there are in fact 2 different things that are called "intervals": intervals between tuning pitches (which is your first example) and intervals between scale notes (your second example). Thinking of them as different things (and calling them differently) has helped me a lot with modeling musical objects in scalextric. For example, tuning intervals in different tunings (12-TET vs. Pythagorean) can end up having the same logical interval name because they are approximating the same logical relationship between notes even though the physical frequencies are different.

2. sub-scales = what you call interval sequence.

If you don't mind, we can continue this conversation by email. Mine is in my profile on HN.

Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks for your answer. To me, the thrill of modeling the rich and vast domain of music practices across the world is a never-ending source of joy and discovery. To answer your specific points:

1. In my own similar library (https://github.com/infojunkie/scalextric) I decided to pragmatically throw an exception if the transpose method is called on an untransposable scale... At the moment I'm not trying very hard to handle all the cases of transposability - I'm sure there's a mathematical object like a group or ring to describe such cases.

2. I'll read your code to understand better how you handle sub-scale sequences. I would like to revisit my own approach to start at the dyads (sequence of 2 tones plucked from a given tuning) and build up longer sequences from those. I think this would allow to distinguish between ascending and descending sequences in a natural way.

3. I've spent quite a bit of time with MusicXML, and some time with MEI as well.. Yes, neither format has a model for arbitrary tunings which is a glaring gap. MusicXML does represent the full set of visual accidentals (including custom SMuFL glyphs) as well as per-note decimal pitch alterations that can accommodate any cent value. MEI also represents a reasonably complete set of accidentals although it's a closed set, as opposed to MusicXML's open set of accidentals. MEI supports a few pre-defined tunings which also falls short of generality. In addition, MEI does not support per-note pitch alterations, which makes it even harder to represent anything outside the tunings that it pre-defines.

There's unfortunately little activity to update these formats to include general tunings. I'm having discussions in both communities, maybe you'd like to add your voice: https://github.com/music-encoding/music-encoding/issues/1167, https://github.com/w3c/musicxml/discussions/586.

4. I've also spent quite a bit of time on MIDI microtonality... There are 3 main approaches that I'm aware of:

a. MIDI Tuning System which maps the 128 MIDI notes to arbitrary frequencies.

b. Pitch bending which has the limitation that you mentioned above. MPE is essentially an organized methodology for reusing empty MIDI channels in a round-robin fashion for pitch bends and other controller effects.

c. MIDI 2 supports per-note controller settings out of the box, thereby superseding MPE.

My current focus is to create a MusicXML => MIDI conversion pipeline that supports arbitrary tunings, using Verovio as the MIDI conversion engine. I am of course "inventing" new MusicXML elements to represent these tunings and their mappings (and MEI elements too, because Verovio represents its own internal state based on MEI). My aim is to produce a MIDI version of the canonical Sagittal Example (https://www.sagittal.org/exmp/index.htm) from a MusicXML file.

Comment · 1 year ago
Fascinating. I'm working on many adjacent pieces myself - my name for this whole initiative is music-i18n because I see it as the equivalent of adding software layers to support world languages and locales - in this case musical ones.

I am especially interested to hear your plans / thoughts about the following:

- Supporting non-ET tunings

- Supporting tetrachords and other scale building blocks (like Arabic ajnas)

- Importing/exporting MusicXML

- Exporting to MIDI

Thanks!

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
That was the response I feared. Thanks :)
Comment · 1 year ago

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