Khyam Allami presented his long-term research project in Beirut yesterday, and it’s an exciting one. Hundreds of tuning systems, ajnās, and maqāmāt are now in a free, open archive, and there’s a free MIDI plug-in that lets you apply tunings (and tweak them by ear) across all major software tuning formats.
Read moreKids today, with their 31 equal divisions of the octave. Yes, it’s the music of Nicolà Vicentino, a Renaissance theorist and composer who built his own microtonal harpsichord to accommodate his experimental tunings. But it’s not just a theoretical experiment: there is some connection to musical practice (even if Vicentino was basically making this up). Food for thought as we mess with digital tuning systems and microonality.”
Steinberg’s Dorico is slowly realizing a dream of notation that has spanned decades of scoring software. How could you combine engraving precision (think Leland Smith’s SCORE) with graphical ease-of-use? That might sound easy, but it’s been one of the toughest challenges in music software. Dorico 6.2 is a free update that shows how much progress they’re making — before we look to the horizon and Dorico 7.