[stella] Table of Note Values?

Subject: [stella] Table of Note Values?
From: Nick S Bensema <nickb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 02:08:45 -0700 (MST)
I would like someone who has the necessary equipment, or a really damn
good ear, to load up SoundX and write down what each pitch and distortion
value make what notes.

Ideally, this would go through all 31 pitch values, and all of the unique
distortion values except maybe the noise ones. 

Even more ideally, it would say exactly how much each pitch was out of 
tune, in cents, so that a prospective VCS music composition could lean 
towards scales which use notes that are out of tune in the same way.  

It's hard to explain it from a musician's standpoint, but that information
would be very useful.  Let's say I'm writing a piece in the key of A, but
the best A tone I could get is out of tune by +20 cents.  A typical fifth 
interval, say, between an A note and an E note, would sound OK if I could
get both A and E off by +20 cents or close, but if A were off by +20 and E 
were off by -25, it would sound downright crappy, because E would effectively 
sound out of tune by 45 cents, which is almost halfway to an E-flat.  So I
would either try to use a different distortion to get closer to E+20, or I 
would just program the piece in a different key.  It'd certainly sound better 
tuned down a half-step than it would if the fifth were out of tune.  

Unfortunately, my efforts to hook the 2600's audio output into my guitar
tuner have been as of yet unsuccessful.  To be honest, I can't even
load SoundX into my 2600 because Windows doesn't want to play WAVs, DOS
doesn't want to play WAVs in a way that the Supercharger likes, and my
CD-ROM won't play CDs.  Besides, someone out there might have a better
tuner than I have.

Whoever creates this table will no doubt spawn off a whole colony of
2600 music demos, and he'll get his name in my web page.  Unless it is
accomplished by a female, in which all the same applies with different
pronouns.



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