[jazzplusplus-devel] Making Jazz++ 'microtonality capable'

[Aaron K. J. <akj...@co...>]

Hey all,

I'm new to the list, but I wanted to see if I could help generate interest 
and/or get guidance helping to code-in what would be a very useful feature 
into Jazz++ : microtonal scales.

As a microtonal composer, I have been frustrated for years by the lack of 
readily available tools, the biggest and the best always assuming a 
12-equal/octave bias. I have my own text-based tools, but I think it would be 
lovely to have a piano roll GUI to compose micro-music with on Linux, and 
yes, port it to Windoze as well. I think that with a bit of effort, we could 
make Jazz++ microtonal ready.

One way would be to have 12-equal a default, and enable importing the nearly 
universally accepted scala file format (.scl), and have the interface change 
the number of notes/oct(pseudo-octave?) in response. Then, each 'note' 
representation would be a combination of note-on plus pitch-bend bytes (this 
is the most common way to do microtonal MIDI).

It would be most excellent to do work in Jazz++ using historical non-equal 
temperament scales, various n-equal temperaments, various Just Intonation 
systems, and the rest, would it not?

How much of the architecture would have to change? I would love to help 
development, but I would need guidance to get up to speed on the current 
architecture, etc. Plus, I might need some help with some minutia of C++: I 
know C fairly well, Python very well.

Another question: could we implement a raw serial midi driver from within 
Jazz++: something primitive and scheduler-based that could send raw MIDI 
bytes to a serial port? Has this already been done?

Best,
-- 
Aaron Krister Johnson