-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan Day 
To: Csound mailing list 
Date: Tuesday, April 28, 1998 9:12 AM
Subject: Re: More on floats in Midi


>I'm not trying to defend Midi I just think that floats are over kill and
>really not worth sacrificing bandwidth for eg channels, amount of control
>info, timing resolution. A replacement for midi should be robust, cheap
>(yes sorry) and easy to set up (sorry again). When I mean abstract I mean
>like in object-oriented programming, there are places where different forms
>of control belong, one of my criticism of csound is it lack of support for
>the abstraction of control. Don't give me this patronising 'real
>musician'/'Classically trained musician' nonsense 16 bit, 65536 levels, is
>beyond any musicians level of control,

My apologies if I seemed patronizing to you. My remarks were not meant to be
so. However, my experience in this field is considerable and includes making
music with acoustical instruments, electronic instruments before MIDI,
electronic instruments after MIDI, Cmix, Csound, and software I have written
myself. My judgement arises from this experience and not from preconceptions
about how things are supposed to sound or how I would them to sound. I can
hear very small differences (milliseconds of time, fractional cents of
pitch, the difference between 44.1 and 48 KHz sampling rates, etc.), and I
have observed other musicians also hearing these very small differences.

I much prefer working in a numerically precise and abstract representation
where I don't have to fiddle the details, I can just describe what I want.

For realtime work, the bandwidth of MIDI is already very limited by its slow
serial protocol - this is one of the main things we would like to do away
with. Floats over TCP/IP at 10 megabits per second would have a GREAT deal
more zip than bytes over MIDI and 31 kilobits per second.

yes you can hear two identical
>sounds beat when separated by less than .2 cents, but do you really want to
>specify that their pitches are 10537.6317 cents and 10537.6434 cents or
>that one is 0.0117 cents sharp to the other. Midi should not be designed to
>make up for deficiencies in sound module design.

If pitch is represented as any sort of floating point number, then it is
easy to translate that number to Hertz, cents, octaves, steps, MIDI key
numbers, or anything else with one line of code.