Talk:Musical Editor

scales and such

I have posted a question about the Musical Editor on the "Ask a question" page of the OLPC project, about which kind of music systems that are used for the Musical Editor. It seems that CSound software is used for generating the music. While checking the CSound website, I saw that they have a lot of samples for different instruments, different kinds of music but I didn't see anything about different music systems: CSound files are using the hard coded frequencies of the different notes (don't enter 'la', but enter 440 Hz and so on). I wonder how the Musical Editor is handling the translation of the note names into frequencies ('do', 're' ... into ± 520 Hz, ± 590 Hz) and if this is extensible to music systems and their corresponding note names as they are used in some third world countries.

Fixed frequencies cover most systems. It'd be nice to also support a purely ratio-controlled system, where a given note is an exact simple ratio relative to some other note in the recent past. Probably the ratios should be restricted such that numerator and denominator have no common factors and no prime factors greater than 7.