thetwom / Tuner

Tuner app

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Extended 1/4 meantone

HubbyG opened this issue Β· comments

Would it be easy enough to knock up an extended 1/4 meantone temperament which has all the usuals plus Eb Bb F# G# C# but also caters for instruments with a few split sharps i.e. extra D# A# & Ab and so 15 pitches per octave?

(I see the similar 31 edo has all 31 pitches defined, so looks doable)

Defining scales is kept pretty generic. So it should not be very difficult (as a long as there is nothing exotic, which is not covered yet by the implementation). The more difficult question is about which scales to deliver with the app. At the moment, there is no option to add custom scales, so only options are:

  • Add new scale to the official version of the app (but this should be a scale of general use, no very rare cases)
  • Fork the app and add it manually to your own needs.

Yes, the difficult question at the moment is to decide, what is rare, and what not.

We have to separate two things here:

  • Adding a new scale to the app should be doable quite quickly, since the structure prepared for that.
  • Having an user definable option. This is very challenging, because you need user interaction. Especially for non-12-tone-scales it is hard since the user must be able to provide note names. This is not very quickly done.

Maybe your requested scales are still worth trying to add? Not sure if this is just personal for you or if it is also used by others? Is there literature about it? Maybe you could describe, how it is constructed. Just having cent values for each note? Or is it based on ratios?

Maybe you can try this: v6.5.0-splitwolf
Most important to check would, if it is correctly implemented. E.g. if you select the temperament, you find the cent values there. These must be correct. For a quick check I list them here:

0.00,  // c   
76.05,  // c#  
193.16,  // d   
269.21,  // d#  
310.26,  // eb  
386.31,  // e   
503.42,  // f   
579.47,  // f#  
696.58,  // g   
772.63,  // g#  
813.69,  // ab  
889.74,  // a   
965.78,  // ais 
1006.84,  // bb  
1082.89,  // b   
1200.00,  // cs

Or let me know if you need additional info for being able to check.

Thanks for trying so quickly. Good to know, that the scale is correct. Thanks for the remark about the naming. I will adapt this accordingly. If you find other issues (also small issues, similar to the naming, let me know).

There is no "buy me a coffee" link. Still, thanks for willing to support this project.

Ok, (hopefully) improved naming is now in the next release candidate v6.5.0-rc2. Will wait a few days, then make it official

Thanks for naming the further issues. The explanations in respect of the wording make sense to me. Will change this for the official release.

About showing the sequence of fifths. I also agree, that this would be nice to have. Just showing cent values is pretty abstract and makes it much harder to understand. It would also help to better know whether this is the tuning, which one would expect. Unfortunately, the current code structure makes this a bit difficult, so for now I will leave it without showing the sequence of fifths.

but do you have any other means by which we can encourage or support this fabulous project?

For the scope of this project it is not necessary. I think this is bit different to other projects, where the developers make a living from it. I am glad I could help a little and it is interesting to understand at least a bit, that music has more dimensions than our standard 12-note scale.

Indeed, interesting to see, that extended meantone might be quite helpful for more scenarios.

your understanding and appreciation of diverse musical instrument tunings

Not really understanding ... I think I get some of theoretical ideas, but to be honest, practice is non-existent for everything beyond edo12 :D. Which is a bit of a pity, but time has its limits :-).

I can see the other various non-12 pitch systems to choose from also presently show cent values only.

All other non-12 scales are actually EDO scales, to my knowledge they are not based on cycles of fifths. Which is the reason, why it isn't shown. Actually, some of the 12-tone scales do also not show circle of fifths, since they are based on rational number ratio instead of circle of fifths (but then the ratios are shown).

Qudos also for including Helmholtz notation too

This request actually came from here #60 :-)

Valid question :-). I took the opportunity and realeased v6.5.0. As for fdroid and google play this might take a few day to pick it up.

What do you think? Should we close this issue or are there remaining requests?