JohnG

Here in the UK we seem to have lost pounds and ounces and inches, feet and yards and pennies and shillings for a simplified 'more logical' system. I much preferred the old way. But then I like minims, crotchets and quavers too. Part of a dying breed I suppose. Oh well! Just been reading about Göbekli Tepe. I wonder how they measured things all those years ago?

Tell her the octaves are in tune. 2:1 and major fifths are almost in tune. But the thirds are awful in E.T.

And the really, really pathetically ridiculous thing about this premise is that it's based on Hz. Ever asked yourself "what really is Hertz?" A. Simple, it's cycles per second. Q.What exactly is a second? A. Well, it's a sixtieth of a minute. Q. What's a minute? A. A sixtieth of an hour. Q. What's an hour? A. A twenty-fourth of a day. Q. But why 24? Why not, for example, ten hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and a hundred seconds in a minute? Wouldn't that be more logical? Q. Why 24, 60 , 60? It makes no sense. Lets change to 10, 100, 100. New hours, new minutes and new seconds. Then Hz changes; the speed of light changes (or, rather, the way we measure it, and so on. The second is just some arbitrary way that humans decided to measure time, who knows how long ago. It's not a fixed cosmological constant. Why 360 degrees in a circle. Why not 100 degrees in a right angle then a circle would be 400 degrees. My children asked me these questions around 30 years ago. Any thoughts?

The theme tune from Spike's Q5? Without equal.

No, not when you're listening to the sound of bagpipes, an accordeon playing or that thing they call Rap. Then, the further away the speakers are, the better. Wouldn't you agree? They're the speakers for me. ?

"Zappa in Munich" ... the town's the clue. "fis moll" in Deutsch = F sharp minor in Englisch, sorry English.

When I write about temperament, I'm not referring to the tuning of A, whether the modern A=440Hz or the baroque A=415Hz (roughly a semitone lower). So in that sense you're quite correct. I'm referring to the tuning of fifths that one does when tuning, e.g. a piano or harpsichord, etc. A 'perfect' fifth (e.g. C to G) has a ration of 3:2, discovered allegedly by Pythagoras, but if we tune a series of perfect fifths (let's say starting on F) with the ratio 3:2, until we have gone all the way round the circle of fifths, and end up on Bb, we want to end up where we started, but much further up the keyboard. But we don't, we end up about half a semitone too high. The interval of Bb to F is way out of tune. Here's the arithmetic. F to C to G to D to A to E to B to F# to C# to G# to Eb to Bb to F. 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 x 3/2 = 129.746 Going up the required number of octaves (a piano keyboard is useful here) 2/1 x 2/1 x 2/1 x 2/1 x 2/1 x 2/1 x 2/1 = 128.0 So, somehow we have to lose that overshoot of 1.746 (called a Pythagorean comma) by flattening some or all of the intervening fifths. Equal temperament (ET) divides the comma equally across all the notes, but wasn't common until the first quarter of the 20th century (it was very difficult to tune). ET gives good fifths but results in very poor thirds. Other 'temperaments', common in the baroque era,'use different ways of dividing the comma. And it's one of these I was referring to, 1/4 comma meantone.

As David Baay as had, I don't buy this at all, at least not in equal temperament. Note that in Charpentier's chart he doesn't list all the keys, just 17 of them. Why? Because at that time his keyboard instruments would have been tuned in quarter comma meantone. Keys outside those listed would have had so many "wolves", i.e. notes relatively out of tune, that they were unusable. Try retuning to 1/4 comma and THEN listen to the differences in the different keys. As an example, Bach (Joh. Seb.) wrote 15 each of his 2 part inventions and 3 part sinfonias (also believed to have been written for meantone tuning) that's why not 24. It's relatively easy to find MIDI files of these on the Internet. They can be easily put into a MIDI file player that will render them in different temperaments. It's only by experimenting with something like this that you realise that Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were NOT using E.T. Real key differences. E.T. means everything sounds the same just transposed. Non-E.T. gives true Key Colour. Just my 0.02c! JohnG.

Whoops, what a blunder! As you say zoology was, perhaps, not their strong point. Aren't pilot whales and dolphins, in fact air breathing mammals, not fish? Whereas the salmon is, indeed, a fish. (I've often thought, shouldn't zoology actually be spelled zooology, maybe hyphenated zoo-ology?) Passing thoughts certainly can be illuminatingly illogical, leaving one feeling, somehow, ill-at-ease. Donchathink?

<Sprachpolizei> ... for illustrat ed ion purposes. FTFY ? ... or illustrative purposes, or illegitimate purposes, or illimitable, or illogical, or Illuminati, or illuminating, or illusionist, or even illustrious porpoises ... just not illustrated. Got it? </Sprachpolizei> (Entschuldigung, ich war mehr als acht Jahre Englischlehrer in Deutschland!)

<grammar police> "... WAY too long ... There, FTFY. </grammar police> Tsk, tsk, tsk! ? ? ?

Oh No! Poor ickle pigwet! P.S. Any becan?

How about a sing along? P.S. I notice that only Vera is practising suitable social distancing!

Brilliant! ?

Lo and behold, Larry, Northern Sounds is back on line! ?

Download as a zip file called "MIDI_2-0_Specification_Version_1-0.zip". This can be unzipped in the usual way, I use 7-Zip. The result is 5 pdf files which you can print if you want.

Ah! A good old structured cabling cabinet. I had to put together a course for British Telecom pre-sales and support employees teaching them how this worked for telephony, ISDN and Ethernet back in the mid 90's. That and modems, ISDN TAs, a bit of early DSL, plus a little html. Ended up giving up to 40 four days courses every year from '96 to some time in Y2K. I beat you by only a couple of years. Started assembler programming in '66 then COBOL in '68. After that it was all sorts of machine code as I worked on FEPs and other mini computers and early servers. After a bit of training with Intel, I got involved with DOS, early OS/2 and Windoze, device drivers and stuff like that. Twenty years with a major UK computer manufacturer, now a part of Fujitsu, doing early real-time and on-line systems. Left in '92. Re-employed as a contractor after that for another ten years or so. All intensely geeky stuff majoring in data communications protocols, etc. My wife reckons that if you could look inside my head it would all be binary and octal and Hexadecimal. ... All neatly structured into TCP/IP packets! Strangely, I never did get involved with mobile data comms.

Good to see another geek on the forum. I started as an electronics apprentice in 19... (a long time ago) and this was what I worked on for a while: Later on (still in the sixties) I moved over into the computer department of B.A.C. and this was what I became familiar with for a while: These are both pictures of the RCA301 machine, rebadged in the UK as an ICT1500. Later on I worked on early Ethernet and Ungermann Bass equipment, then ISDN both Basic and Primary rate before becoming 'involved' with digital telephony and the Mitel digital exchanges. Then BT and Basic and Primary rate (ISDN2 & ISDN30) then DSL and DSLAMs and so on, then with a few RBOCs in the US and Deutsche Telekom and the Scandinavian Telcos, etc. Finally satellite data comms with InMarSat. The last one wore me out so much I decided to take early retirement , moved to Germany for ten years, where I taught English to business people as a hobby (hence being a grammar nasty), now back in the UK (with my German wife) and doing as little as possible in the greatest amount of time.

Most devices I've worked with, from the Cheetah MS6 to date have sets of tables held in EPROM with, usually, three bytes per note for the possible 128 MIDI notes. Something of the detail can be seen in the MIDI 1.0 Detailed Specification (downloadable from the MMA as a pdf) starting on page 47 MIDI tuning. There it describes the Frequency Data Format and also the SysEx message(s) that can be sent to alter the tuning as a four byte message per note. This allows tuning as fine as 0.0061 of a Cent (a Cent=1/100th of a semitone.) About halfway down page 49 is the spec. for the Single Note Tuning Change (Real-Time). So you can alter your sound module's tuning by simply sending one or more SysEx messages. There were some extensions to the MIDI Tuning Standards released in '99 which can be seen in RP-020, CA-020 and CA-021 also made avaialble on the MMA site in the specs section. So we don't need MIDI 2.0 for highly accurate MIDI tuning. (Assuming, in one's opinion, that 0.0061 of a cent is accurate enough.) ;-) As long as the device one is using actually supports such accuracy. Most modern MIDI hardware (that I've used) doesn't support the full accuracy of the MIDI 1.0 specification. For instance, there's not one keyboard which I've tested, that gives a pitch bend accuracy greater than 10 bits, despite the 14 bits allowable by MIDI 1.0. Many only offer only 7 or 8 bit accuracy. :-( I have several MIDI modules too, 2 x Yamaha MU1000 with VL, AN, DX and PF cards in them, as well as an ancient Roland SC-8850, all gathering dust.

I dare say the Arduino is okay to process the code, but the reason the Motu kit is there is to buffer the message(s) and provide precise timing AND the appropriate voltage and current to drive the physical interface. In the case of MIDI 2 the packetised MIDI data will have to be inserted into the packet structure of the transmission mechanism being used, i.e. USB, LAN, etc. There's no point trying to send MIDI 2 data to your MIDI 1 sound modules as they will not understand it. Only with a major firmware upgrade (not necessarily possible) are they likely to make any sense of the new packet structure. (Retired Principal Consultant/Data Communications). Last job was writing satellite data comms courses and delivering them to telco's worlwide.

Data communications, i.e. outside the processor environment, was/is driven by devices called UARTs (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitters). Back in the day, these devices were "clocked" by a crystal oscillating at 1MHz. The 31,250 b.p.s. is derived as a subdivision of this clock (keep dividing by 2). Your Motu has UARTs inside it, probaby one per socket, although today they may be collected into one more powerful chip. It's not so much what's inside the computer as what connects the computer to the external networking gear, or one MIDI device to another. One of the reasons that the original MIDI 1 was so widely adopted was because the addition of a UART or 2 and its supporting electronic components and DIN sockets was dirt cheap. Ergo, why not? Currently we have data transmission technologies like USB, firewire, Ethernet etc. It will be these and the adoption of these technologies within our devices that will provide the higher speeds. Not, sadly, DIN plugs and cables. Some of these technologies provide severe limitations on the distance one object can be from another.

Don't care, I certainly won't be around any more! ? ?

Nope! ? ?? The top two are the Trouble clefs, see below. I think that they are some sort of recorder (Blockflöte) rather than the flute we know. The other scores are marked "Traverso". The next two, so I'm told, are " Violinschlussel." (pronounced "vee-oh-leen-sh-luss-ehl".

Be very, VERY grateful that you didn't live in the baroque era, see below. I've also observed the G-clef being used on the bottom line, the F-clef on the top line and ... the C-clef on every single line of the stave (not all at once). ? Not to mention the following monstrosity from Rossini:

WOT! English breakfast with toast instead of fried bread dripping with lard? Not enough calories.