Is it possible to...

[cr3ator84]

perform a 'turn' in Notion 3?

and if not then will this feature be available in version 4?

cheers

[Surfwhammy]

perform a 'turn' in Notion 3?

This is a new musical term for me, so I checked wikipedia, and I like it!

I did a quick check of the NOTION 3 palette and user manual, and I did not find any information on turns, so I think that you have to do it explicitly . . .

THOUGHTS

For the folks who might not know about turns--which includes me until approximately 30 minutes ago--this is the musical symbol for a turn, and it instructs the musician to do a particular type of ornamentation, although the specifics appear to vary depending on the context . . .



[NOTE: This is an example of using the turn symbol as a type of shorthand or whatever . . . ]



[NOTE: And this is one way that a musician can play the turns . . . ]



[SOURCE: Musical Ornament (wikipedia) ]

While I was not aware in an immediately conscious way of this particular type of ornamentation with respect to its having a specific music notation symbol, I like the concept of ornamentation, and it is something I work on every so often toward the goal of memorizing a nice subset of ornamentation techniques for use when composing and playing lead guitar solos in real-time on the fly, since I think there are enough basic types of ornamentation to use a few of them as standard finger patterns, which generally is the way I classify and use standard types of lead guitar phrases . . .

I like to listen to this bit of FUN by Mozart, which I consider to be the definitive catalog of practical ornamentation, in addition to being brilliantly hilarious mind candy . . .

"Twelve Variations on 'Ah vous dirai-je, Maman'" (Mozart) -- MIDI Grand Piano ]

The perspective here in the sound isolation is that regardless of how smart and skilled one might be, there is no way that anyone actually can keep track of all the notes in the Mozart piece without using mnemonics, which also is the case for playing the notes, hence the key is to commit the patterns to memory essentially by obsessively repetitive practicing until you can do it in your sleep without needing to give it any thought in an immediately conscious way, and the fact of the matter is that the only way to do this is to rewire the Frontal Eye Fields (FEF) region of the brain, since the FEF region of the brain can handle processing auditory information in the range of 24 milliseconds to 60 seconds, which is vastly faster than the Auditory Cortex processes auditory information, which for all practical purposes puts the upper limit at approximately 40 notes per second, which is a bit mind-boggling but doable once you discover how to get in touch with your inner idiot savant, where from a curiously enlightening colloquial perspective, this is the way that composers, musicians, and singers do things literally "off the top of their heads", since anatomically the FEF region of the brain is bounded by Brodmann areas #4, #6, and #8, which are at the top center of the brain, which among other things is one of the best clues to the fact that people know a lot more information than they are aware of in any immediately conscious way at any given moment, which is a bit mind-boggling, really . . .

[NOTE: Once you do the requisite finger exercises and assorted researching and studying, which the key aspect of rewiring the FEF region of the brain, the unconscious mind knows all this stuff, and the way to tap into the resulting knowledge is to discover how to let the unconscious mind run the show for a while, which mostly is a matter of suspending conscious thought and judgement in a very specific way, which here in the sound isolation tends to be enhanced by not wearing underpants . . . ]



Frontal Eye Fields (wikipedia)

Mind-boggling!

NOTION 4 AND COMPUTED ORNAMENTATION

I have no idea if NOTION 4 is going to support this, but (a) it is an intriguing idea and (b) over the long run it certainly makes sense . . .

From the perspective of software engineering and algorithm designing the difficult aspect will be deciding how to do it in a practical and sensible way, which should include the ability for the composer to specify and fine-tune a set of parameters, because intuition strongly suggests that there are enough variations to make it a bit frivolous to do it only a few ways without allowing fine-tuning and so forth . . .

Yet, there obviously is a way to do it by specifying parameters and so forth, because it can be transcribed to MIDI and then played under computer control, hence there is an algorithm, although identifying and defining the algorithm will be a bit of work, but FUN work, and Mozart provided the necessary clues in the the late-18th century, for sure . . .

For sure!

[fabiolcati]

Hi.

1. No, Notion3 does not performs embellishments. Related symbols are available but they does not affect playback. You have to notate them out. You can do it on a discrete staff assigned to the same instrument, then hide it and notate it properly with symbol on the main staff of that instrument setting the note velocity to "0".

2. We all hope so.

Regards

[Surfwhammy]

Déjà vu!

Last year in January 2011, GeorgePaul started an interesting discussion about combining various sound libraries and posted a NOTION 3 score for "Trompeta Voluntario", which intrigued me, and as part of doing a few experiments I decided to have a bit of FUN ornamenting the harpsichord based on the idea that Pretend Amadeus Mozart™ was hired for the performance and happened to be in a particularly silly mood at the time, since this was around the time I discovered ornamentation and started listening to "Twelve Variations on 'Ah vous dirai-je, Maman'" (Amadeus Mozart) over and over for hours at a time, which is one of the particularly useful benefits of being primarily a "play by ear" musician, where what happens is that music makes sense without actually needing to understand the reasons when you listen to it for a while, which is fabulous . . .

[NOTE: When I am studying a song, I set iTunes to play it repetitively, and than I let it play all day and all night, which maps to listening to it perhaps thousands of times. And for "play by ear" musicians, the truly fascinating aspect of composing with NOTION 3 is that you get immediate feedback, which makes is easy to identify the notes that do not sound so "good", at which time you can make a few adjustments until all the notes sound "good", and then there you are, where at the same time you are identifying useful bits of information about music theory, for example something technical like "this song must be in a key or mode were F# sounds 'good'" . . . ]

Combining Sound Libraries (Notion Music FORUM)



[NOTE: I redid the mix from last year but used a different set of IK Multimedia T-RackS 3.5 Deluxe VST plug-ins (Brickwall Limiter, Vintage Program Equalizer EQP-1A, White 2A Leveling Amplifier), which included "pumping" the brass, cello, and harpsichord, as well as moving the harpsichord more to the center and front, where I really like the new White 2A Leveling Amplifier, since it "pumps" but retains the tonal textures of instruments. For reference, the ornamented harpsichord is in the first and last thirds of the piece, but the middle is the original harpsichord . . . ]

"Trompeta Voluntario" (Jeremiah Clarke, GeorgePaul, Pretend Amadeus Mozart, Surfwhammy) -- Featuring Pretend Amadeus Mozart on Harpsichord -- MP3 (3.4MB, 266-kbps [VBR], approximately 1 minute and 41 seconds )

Fabulous!

[cr3ator84]

thanks guys for the responses

I've just gone with manually entering all the notes that make up the turn for now

it would be a great feature to have - any good music theory book explains how turns affect a piece of music depending on where they are placed and what type of notes are involved.

cheers

[David Smith]

Note that the turn is an embellishment primarily used in baroque music. There are other types of similar figures: there are a variety of variations (3-5 notes) used in bagpipe music and in recorder music (a 2-note "trill" to effect a note break. Just for speed of entry and score readability, it would be great to be able to use the Turn or similarly define a symbol for such things.

What I do now is to use grace notes to create the figures.

[elerouxx]

Hi.

1. No, Notion3 does not performs embellishments. Related symbols are available but they does not affect playback. You have to notate them out. You can do it on a discrete staff assigned to the same instrument, then hide it and notate it properly with symbol on the main staff of that instrument setting the note velocity to "0".

Regards

Thank you for sharing this important tip. I haven't thought about Notion's ability to hide staves and still play them. So you can write embelishments and other hidden notes on another staff, just in the measures you need to. Or you can also have two copies of a part, one for printing, which you mute, and the other for playback, which you hide.

Another tip for the notation of embelishments and other details: there is a number of fonts around that contain the different musical symbols and you can attach them to the notes, as text, thus delivering a nice score without the need of adding these symbols on the pdf file (I have to do this sometimes).