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From: Bernard B. <ber...@gm...> - 2021-01-09 14:22:39
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Dear friends and colleagues, I haven't sent news for more than a month… The New Year is an opportunity to send my wishes for health, success and feeling of security in 2021. Most of us are witnessing or enduring tragedies that demand efficiency of actions and quietness of mind to remain happy and constructive. Being retired in a small village (690 inhabitants) I have no difficulty cultivating this clarity of mind in a safe environment. I spend most of my time reflecting on musicological issues that had been addressed long time ago, yet left incomplete because of changes in the priorities of our agendas or departure of co-workers. The sanitary situation is there to remind us that life is short and it is important to terminate work that may become useful to others even after a long time. When my colleague Arnold met a young student named Pierre-Yves Asselin in Paris in 1980, I did not not imagine that I would be studying his PhD thesis 40 years later in great detail for its insights into the complex issue of scale models. In 1994 I met a very modest person named C.K. Raju at the guesthouse of Centre for the Development of Advance Computing in Pune (India) but I could not imagine that his masterpiece "Cultural Foundations of Mathematics" would make sense of my entire work 30 years later. These are lessons of patience and determination in achieving a destiny that we build ourselves in such moments. Never miss the right person, the right word, the right book; this is an increasing difficult task as we are saturated with (mis)information! I have completed and documented developments of BP (mainly its interface) with respect to "just intonation", checking and merging advanced systems elaborated in India and Europe/America during the past centuries. All links are in the "Musicology" category of our website: https://bolprocessor.org/category/related/musicology/ The documentation is modified every time I read it again because I need to make sure that explanations are clear and all steps can be reproduced by experimenters of BP. Indeed we'll need more musical examples! I will now work on temperament techniques because it remains true that musicians prefer to use the same scale in all harmonic contexts of their production! All techniques will be exposed and documented. At the beginning of the year it is time to revise the agenda of Bol Processor. Developing MIDI out/in indeed remains on the agenda but it may not be the first priority. Owing to Csound, BP3 can be used in a very productive manner. If we attract interest and support from Csound experts we will be able to publish examples of convincing examples using the sophistication of Csound orchestras. Work on microtonality will be an incentive to design examples and tutorials but BP should not be reduced to this feature. In fact we need to provide an easier access to BP3. I doubt that many users (if any) will undertake installing MAMP, compiling the source code and trying the PHP interface. Sure it works on Mac but there remain open questions on other systems… So, the best way would be to proceed with the installation of an online version. Anthony, does your offer of hiring space still hold? In case it is costly we could create a PayPal account and collect a little money to cover the expense of hosting the platform. At this stage, this online version could do everything we do on our local machines, which is a lot (when using Csound) given that MIDI in/out will never be streamed real-time over the Net (as I understand it). So, I believe it is time to envisage this development… I am enclosing a revised BP3-To-Do.txt file which I have just pushed to GitHub. All the best! Bernard PS. Contact me in a private message if you face difficulties. I sometimes feel anxious not receiving news… |
