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