Sound on Sound review of Notion 4

[thorrild]

Beautifully written condensation of a very large subject, melonsoda!

Best wishes,
Thorrild

[Surfwhammy]

@surfwhammy: the two keyboards of a harpsichord is to create dynamics, the upper manual is usually only with one register (8') while the lower manual can have one or two registers (8' or 8'+ 4' or coupled with the above 8'+8'+4'). With a split-key harpsichord the black keys are split (horizontally, otherwise you'd need tiny fingers!) to have both a chromatic (C-C# = 4 comma) and a diatonic semitone (C-Db = 5 comma).

Great!

Splitting the keys horizontally makes sense to me, if one needs to have different flats and sharps . . .

It is true, most baroque violins like the ones of Stradivari got new necks in around 1830. That's not because the old necks were not perfect, it's just that the style of playing changed. The older necks were a bit thicker and less angled, resulting in a shorter string length. That was perfect for holding the violin without resting your chin on it (the thicker neck ideal to shift positions), however after about 1825 holding the violin between chin and shoulder became the standard and some adjustments had to be made. Also that changed the sound of course, but not as much as the change to metal strings in the 1930ies. By the way, the bows were constantly changed from around 1600 to 1910. Nowadays we play Bach, Beethoven & Co. very often on period instruments (that is instruments exactly built in the style of the time the piece was written). It doesn't have anything to do with being a "purist", it's just fun and inspiring to discover how "the old ones" played their instruments, how different they sound with gut strings instead of metal strings.

Interesting!

As noted, I was a bit surprised when I read that the necks and fingerboards were replaced on most Stradivarius' violins, since it is not something I would do without a lot of pondering and even with a lot of pondering, probably not, at least if I were focused on collecting and preserving . . .

However, if I was focused on playing the violin, then I certainly would consider doing some custom modifications, which is what I have been doing on my Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster, which at present is my "go to" electric guitar that I call "The Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaster®", based in part on doing some as yet pending modifications, which among other things involve adding three more Seymour Duncan pickups for a total of six Seymour Duncan pickups (single-coil size) and a GraphTech GHOST piezoelectric bridge saddle pickup system, which includes a MIDI interface, thereby making it a MIDI guitar as well as regular passive pickup guitar, all of which requires more guitar body routing and two custom cable systems, since most of the passive guitar pickups will be on separate and independent output circuits (perhaps five separate output signals, depending on what makes sense at the time I do the modifications, since there are some interesting things one can do with split-coil humbucking pickups when paired and wired to be switched in different combinations of the four separate split coils), and the GraphTech system requires a MIDI cable and at least one regular cable, where I think that I can run the regular cable as part of the other cable, which makes it two cables (one six-conductor cable with separate shielding for each conductor for the regular output signals and one MIDI cable for the MIDI output) . . .


The Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaster®

About temperament, that is longer story – not enough time to write here… I worked as a piano and organ (+all sorts of harpsichords) tuner for quite some time and well, it's much more complicated than just equal, well temp. and just intonation. To make it short, there is no "true temperament", at least not for our music (that is if you have chords with thirds and fifths), one will always have to make compromises because of the Pythagorean and the syntonic comma. 12 pure fifths don't give the same pitch as 7 pure octaves, and 3 pure thirds don't give a pure octave. Even "just" intonation isn't just. That's physics, and in equal temperament the compromise is not to have any pure intervals, except the octave. Some are better than others, the fifth for example is nearly pure but the major thirds are 14 cent to high… Not nice sounding, and of course, if you can just move your finger a bit to make it better (like if you are a violinist) or sing a bit lower then you do it. Having # and b therefore helps a lot to intonate well.

It is all a matter of compromise in one way or another, but as noted in my previous posts, three things make fundamental sense to me, specifically piano, electric guitar, and soprano treble clef using equal temperament, and this is what I use . . .

With a piano, the only practical way to make changes is via the way the piano is tuned, although with a keyboard synthesizer that has piano-style weighted keys, I think there are ways to change the intonation . . .

I have a KORG Triton Music Workstation (88-Keys), but I have not explored changing the tuning, although if it is possible to do with a synthesizer, then I think the Triton should be able to do it . . .

This list of accidentals from wikipedia looks to be one version of a somewhat complete set of everything:


Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation (wikipedia)

However, it suffers from the problem of having only fixed intervals, so from the perspective of software designing and engineering I think the extreme solution involves making everything variable so that everything can be changed under user control, although how useful and productive this might be is another matter, and it certainly is possible to do some of this by creating custom user-defined samples . . .

Regarding fretted necks, well that's an old story (older than the piano), even Galileo Galilei's father Vincenzo wrote about it, there were double frets (little wooden frets, called tastini) for lutes in the 16th century. The frets on this Stratocaster however look quite crudely done. Anyway, at least here you can see that the G# is a bit lowered, so it will sound nicely in an E major chord, but you can't use it for an f minor chord, because that requires Ab. This problem could be solved using double frets, but even that wouldn't be "true", one only could make sort of a mean tone tuning. String diameter is a topic of course, but in practical life much less of a problem than the frets or inharmonicity. Of course, always depending on what style you play; for heavy metal, you would tune the fifths and octaves pure (Phytagorean tuning) so the distortion (overdrive, etc.) for power-chords are smoother. I've even seen some metal bands that managed to do pure thirds with two guitars, which sounds cool with distortion.

The same thing happens with sitars and some of the other Indian stringed instruments that have movable frets, and in some instances guitars have movable bridges or bridges that can be moved with a minimal amount of work by a luthier . . .

Sometimes, I will tune an electric guitar specifically for the chords of songs when recording rhythm guitar, but i usually retune the guitar before doing lead guitar work . . .

However, with a Stratocaster that has a Fender two-point synchronized tremolo system, something interesting happens when the tremolo system is finely tuned and the whammy bridge moves up and down, as contrasted to up-only, which specifically is that when you press a string to play a note, this pulls the tremolo bridge forward or up by a tiny amount depending on how firmly you press on the string, hence shortens the string and lowers the actual pitch of the note, which adds a new variable to the Gestalt, and this happens when you play chords, as well as when you do string bends, which is one of the reasons that playing a whammy guitar is not so common, with the other primary reason being that there are very specific rules for the times when one can do a bit of whammying and expect it to be heard clearly, which typically takes a year or two to discover unless someone who already knows about it provides a bit of guidance, where one the basic rules is that you need to start a whammy motion early at a time when there is a bit of space in the music, and another rule is that it whammying is easiest to hear when the other instruments move well into the background, which is obvious when you listen to David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) doing a bit of whammying with his Stratocaster, as is the case with James Wilsey who among other things plays whammy lead guitar on a custom-modded Stratocaster for Chris Isaak . . .

"Wicked Game" (Chris Isaak) -- Official Live Video -- YouTube music video

Even when you know all the rules for whammying, it takes two or so years to get the timing and motions to the point that it "just happens" . . .

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[Surfwhammy]

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Anyway, all that doesn't matter much to our topic: For whatever you use Notion – it makes use of standard music notation and since it does it should do it the correct way.

This is consistent with the perspective here in the sound isolation studio, but the difference is in the way one defines "standard music notation" . . .

My perspective is that alternate intonation systems are specific to certain genres, but referring to it as "enharmonic" is inaccurate, because this is the standard definition of "enharmonic" provided by the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

of, relating to, or being notes that are written differently (as A flat and G sharp) but sound the same in the tempered scale

This is the way the wikipedia entry for "enharmonic" explains it:

In modern musical notation and tuning, an enharmonic equivalent is a note, interval, or key signature that is equivalent to some other note, interval, or key signature but "spelled", or named differently. Thus, the enharmonic spelling of a written note, interval, or chord is an alternative way to write that note, interval, or chord. For example, in twelve-tone equal temperament (the currently predominant system of musical tuning in Western music), the notes C♯ and D♭ are enharmonic (or enharmonically equivalent) notes. Namely, they are the same key on a keyboard, and thus they are identical in pitch, although they have different names and different role in harmony and chord progressions.

But, as you know, there also is the "historical" definition, and it allows what otherwise would be identical notes to be different, but as it relates to the standard NOTION 4 follows, I am not convinced that the "historical" definition should be the standard usage, in part because it makes several important presumptions that typically will not be present, with the primary reason being that the MIDI specification does not allow it, which provides a clue to what NOTION 4 does behind the scenes, since the rule in the MIDI specification is that notes have one name, so instead of using C♯ and D♭ as the name, a number is used when C♯ and D♭ refer to the same note . . .

This is where the alternative accidentals provided on the NOTION 4 palette come into play, where if you want C♯ to be different from D♭, then you have to use the alternative accidentals, which provides a solution for the folks who are happier with the resulting notes but inevitably introduces yet another dimension where there are folks who have different requirements altogether and typically will not be happy with any of the alternative accidentals that NOTION 4 provides, where strange as it might be there probably are more of these folks, since once you leave the universe of Western music, everything becomes truly unusual, at least when you relate primarily to Western music, and here I am referring to Eastern or Asian music where some of the scales are very different . . .

Whether using the terms "standard" and "historical" is the best strategy mostly is a matter of semantics, which is fine with me, but overall I strongly suggest that mapping "standard" to 12-tone equal temperament makes the most sense and is the best fit . . .

Yet another problem, which is quite subtle, involves the way sounds for the various instruments are sampled, which basically is done in two ways, where one way involves sampling only some of the actual notes, and the other way involves sampling every note chromatically, where for example with a sampled sound library with C4 and D4 sampled, playing C♯4 requires the virtual instrument engine to compute or to emulate the note based on a logarithmic extrapolation algorithm which might include some code to make adjustments for the rate at which the speed of tremolo volume changes or the rate at which pitch fluctuates with vibrato, and when this happens C4 and D3 are played by a real musician on a real instrument, but C♯4 is emulated by a computer algorithm . . .

[NOTE: With tremolo set to a fixed speed and intensity, which varies the volume level or loudness of notes and chords, what happens with sampled sound libraries where all the notes are not sampled chromatically is that the computed or emulated notes usually will have different tremolo than the unaltered sampled notes, where if the note used as the basis for the emulated note is lower than the emulated note, the tremolo speed and intensity will be slightly faster and louder, but if the note selected as the basis for the emulated note is higher, then the tremolo speed and intensity will be slightly slower and quieter, and the differences will vary depending on the pitch of the notes as well, since normal human hearing is more sensitive to some frequencies but less sensitive to other frequencies, and the difference in pitch among two adjacent notes is smaller with low frequency notes than with midrange and high-frequency notes, where for example the difference in the low-pitch "E" string on an electric bass (E1) at standard tuning (Concert A = 440-Hz) is 41.204-Hz and F1 is 43.654-Hz for a difference of approximately 2.5-Hz, while in contrast the difference in the high-pitch "e" string of an electric guitar (E4) at the same standard tuning is 329.63-Hz and F4 is 349.23-Hz for a difference of approximately 19.5-Hz, where the difference between two adjacent notes increases geometrically as the frequency moves into the upper midrange and high frequencies. The duration of emulated notes also affects the way tremolo changes, and for these reasons, if possible, the best strategy is to use a set of dry sampled sounds when the notes are only partially sampled and then to apply tremolo after the fact with a tremolo effects plug-in, so that the tremolo is constant for all the notes--sampled real notes and emulated notes--and depending on the type of vibrato and the way it is computed by an effects plug-in or script, this also can be the case with vibrato . . . ]

In contrast, when a sampled sound library is sampled chromatically, there is a sample for each note, and each sampled note was played by a real musician on a real instrument using the specified articulation, which tends to map to a significant increase in the price of the sampled sound library because it requires more work, where as an example getting everything that Vienna Symphonic Library sells costs approximately $20,000 (US), as best as I have been able to determine, and one of the reasons is that have elaborately sampled sounds . . .

Hence, from a common sense perspective, unless the sampled sound library actually has a sampled sound played by a real musician on a real instrument in the specified articulation for every note, what you get some of the time is an emulated note, which is fine with me, but it tends to let a bit of air out of any arguments about tonal accuracy and tonal purity, and if one is not very careful, the resulting audio sounds more like a 1960s Farfisa Combo Organ or VOX Continental Organ . . .

All of it is part of music, and I am fine with it, but as noted in the summary of my first post, delving into this level of detail and introducing a virtual festival of definitions and rules that nearly nobody can remember, let alone understand intimately, has the overall affect of making less knowledgeable folks hate music notation and in some instances makes them hate music in general . . .

How many years does one need to study violin before someone provides the clue that, "When we told you that C♯ and D♭ are the same note, like on a grand piano, well we lied, so forget everything you learned and now we can start over and go with the fantasy that C♯ and D♭ are different notes and that there are no notes in-between them and just above and below them, none of which are C and D"?

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[Surfwhammy]

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Again, I am fine with all of it, because it is music, and in one way or another all music is good, and if someone wants to focus on a different tuning system and wants to have more differences among notes, then great . . .

Great!

But calling it "standard" and expecting everyone to understand all the definitions, rules, and nuances is a bit of a stretch, which here in the sound isolation studio makes it impractical in a common sense way . . .

Using the ability to set the reference tuning pitch in NOTION 4 and the ability to use the NOTION 4 accidentals palette provides solutions, but the way everything works when during playback is dependent on the engine and the way sampled sounds were played, recorded, and processed, and if one is going to use some of these features, I think it makes sense to do a bit of research to determine how the respective VSTi virtual instrument engines generate audio and whether the corresponding sampled sound libraries were created with real musicians playing real instruments that were tuned and played using equal temperament, well temperament, just intonation, meantone temperament, or whatever, which includes knowing how to specify the desired temperament, which overall is the best way to avoid the "Emperor's New Clothes" dilemma, where the words are impressive but the Baroque string quartet sounds like Question Mark & The Mysterians, which is fabulous . . .

"96 Tears" (Question Mark & The Mysterians) -- 45 RPM record -- YouTube music video

Fabulous!

P. S. It is all good, and after pondering everything for a while I might do some experiments in NOTION 4 with the alternative accidentals, since they are a bit intriguing, and if nothing else I think they can be used to have a bit of FUN as a virtual whammy bar for instruments that do not have whammy systems, really . . .

Really!

P. P. S. After reading this current set of posts a few times to do editing and so forth, I am revisiting the use of "logarithmic" and "geometric" with respect to frequency and pitch, where "cents" are logarithmic and divide an octave into 1,200 pieces, but the notes themselves double in frequency with each octave, which is better described as being geometric or exponential . . .


Octaves increase exponentially when measured on a linear frequency scale (Hz).


Octaves are equally spaced when measured on a logarithmic scale (cents).

[SOURCE: Cent (wikipedia) ]

On the other hand, volume is logarithmic and for something to be perceived as being twice as loud, the volume needs to increase 10 times, hence the "decibel" unit, but this also is dependent on the pitch of notes, since as noted the human ear is more sensitive to certain frequencies, with midrange frequencies being the ones to which the human ear is most sensitive, while low frequencies are the ones to which the human ear is least sensitive, although this also is the case with higher frequencies, as shown visually by various equal loudness curves, which is an entirely different topic, as well as being the fundamental reason that one needs a calibrated full-range studio monitor system to do accurate mixing and mastering, all of which is explained in one of my topics in the IK Multimedia FORUM, for sure . . .



[SOURCE: Equal Loudness Curve (wikipedia) ]

The Fabulous Affordable Studio Monitor System Project (IK Multimedia FORUM)

For sure!

P. P. P. S. I enjoy this type of discussion, because I always discover new bits of information about music, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!

[elerouxx]

And that's what happens when you mention 'flat' in this forum.