in need to use MIDI to play note?

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5.00/5 (1 vote)

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C#

C#4.0

i need to play Quarter tone by MIDI (Arabic Tone)

thanks for help me

Posted 14-Nov-11 4:22am

shadiabusamra

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 14-Nov-11 11:48am

Very interesting question. My 5, even though formally it is not even a question. :-)
--SA

2 solutions

Solution 1

There is an article here on CP that might interest you: C# MIDI Toolkit[^]. The article is a bit outdated maybe, but it should give you enough pointers and references for further research. The latest update from its author Leslie Sanford[^] was back in 2007 whereas the original post was 2004.

Good luck!

—MRB

Posted 14-Nov-11 4:37am

Manfred Rudolf Bihy

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 14-Nov-11 11:34am

Manfred, what you referenced is a good thing I personally enjoyed to use, but you probably did not pay attention for the one requirement which makes all the problem: OP needs to use quoter-tones. This is probably in attempt to support Arabic microtonal scale, which is basically a 24-tone equal temperament.

It looks to me that in MIDI this is all gray area, unfortunately. Please see my solution, which is not a complete solution, just some direction. The problems looks really difficult.

--SA

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-14T05:30:00

Sorry, MIDI is totally based on European equal temperament, 12 half-tones per octave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament[^].

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI[^].

In contrast, Arabic music is microtonal, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtonal_music[^], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_tone_system[^] (very, very interesting to me, too bad I'm so poorly familiar with it).

The attempts to find microtonic features in MIDI are not really fruitful. This is a fair judgment (http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=75229[^]):

Xenakios wrote:
They don't. Commercial music doesn't use microtones in any systematic way, so there are no significant amount of commercial software tools that helps with that.

MIDI itself is pretty much void of the concept of microtonality, it was originally designed for equal tempered music played by keyboard players and has remained so to this day. Microtunings will always be hacks with MIDI…

I know only one idea for such a hack, but I never tried to use it. This is about using pitch bend, something which allows to deviate from a "standard" semitone using a "bend wheel" on a keyboard to imitate instruments capable of bending like a guitar.

Look at the MIDI specs:
http://www.midi.org/techspecs/midimessages.php[^].

It looks like you can setup pitch bend sensitivity to apply bending of 50 cents which is a quoter-tone (one cent is a pitch ratio corresponding to equal temperament of semitone divided into 100 steps, 1 cent each, on logarithmic scale).

However, from the other source, it looks like a real interpretation of a bend message depends on the synthesizer; a maximum value of a Pitch Bend Message of 16383 only says "bend as high as possible". That would so much of a disaster even for European music, so I hardly can believe that, but see http://www.srm.com/qtma/davidsmidispec.html[^].

Now, I never tried to look at the MIDI API to figure if it's possible to use bending and what's the result of it. Try to do it. It would be very nice if you write us about your findings.

I personally would be really grateful if you could give me some links to Arabic microtonal music samples and/or other related literature. I used to listen just a tiny bit, very interested.

—SA