MdaPiano and microtonality

Questions
1

Hi all,

I was messing around with the MdaPiano extension today, in combination with scale/degree/tuning variations in the context of Pbind and Events. After about an hour of feeling like I was slowly going insane, I came to the conclusion that MdaPiano does not support tuning systems outside of twelve-tone equal temperament:

s.boot;

{MdaPiano.ar(452, Line.kr(1,-1,2,doneAction:2), 50)}.play(fadeTime:0);
//internally rounded to 69.midicps = 440 Hz

{MdaPiano.ar(453, Line.kr(1,-1,2,doneAction:2), 50)}.play(fadeTime:0);
//internally rounded to 70.midicps = 466.16 Hz

I don’t know the internals of this plugin — is there anyone familiar with MdaPiano who can confirm this? Or am I overlooking something?

Eli

2

From experience, I can confirm. No microtuning.

I even saw an instance where a frequency in Hz got rounded to the wrong MIDI note and sounded a half step too… flat IIRC.

hjh

3

MdaPiano is a sampler adapted from an old VST plugin. There are many free piano sample libraries out there, such as Ivy Audio Piano in 162 and U. Iowa, that I would recommend instead. In both cases, you will need to auto-trim and fade out the samples a bit since they’re very long, but it shouldn’t be hard to rig something up with PlayBuf.

In general, it’s best to try to stay away from sc3-plugins in production code IMO. There are rumblings from the dev team about an exit strategy for that project.

4

Interesting, thanks both. I’ve rigged up at alternative using my own piano sample library and PlayBuf. I had been operating under the assumption that MdaPiano was synthesis-based (where are the samples actually stored?). I generally avoid the sc3-plugins for my own personal projects — but in this case I’m working on a lecture on tunings and temperaments, and thought MdaPiano might save time. But since it can’t do microtonality, it’s not much use in this particular case.

5

That’s a cute joke actually: 58600+ lines of decimal integers in https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supercollider/sc3-plugins/main/source/MdaUGens/mdaPianoData.h :laughing:

hjh

2 Likes
6

Wow. Was not expecting that!

1 Like