Making bulk changes to Musical Discovery
tunes.
This screen permits you to alter the currently loaded tune, by extracting
tracks or bar ranges, by shifting notes horizontally or vertically,
by transposing into another key, or by making bulk changes to volume, instrument,
channel, duration, or track parameters.
Specify track and range of bars.
Before performing any operation, you must define the track, and the bars on
which you wish to operate. At the top of the screen you may tick the box for All
Tracks, or else select a single track from the drop-down list of tracks.
Then specify the From Bar No, and the To Bar No. When this
form is first opened, the defaults for these values are from first to last bar,
for the first track of the tune. If you wish
to hear a single track on its own, you may use the orange
Track Filter button (at top right of screen) to mute the tracks you wish
to silence.
The top section of this screen permits you to extract a specified part of the currently loaded tune,
and place it into a new tune, by clicking the lavender button Extract
track and/or range of bars. You can then listen to this extract by clicking
the Play button in the Playbar. If you wish to make this extract
available as the current loaded tune for all other screens, click the beige
button entitled Apply all changes to
currently loaded tune, at top right of the screen. If you wish to
save to disk, you can now do so with MENU File -> Save. After making any changes, click the Play button on the PlayBar to hear the
result.
There are 4 further sections in this
screen as follows: (all operate only on the track and bars selected as
above).
- Horizontal Shift. This
permits a section of music from a specified track to be moved left or right
by a number of bars or beats. Shifting by ticks is not supported in the
current release of Musical Discovery. Click the option button for bars or for beats,
and specify the number thereof in the Number of units to shift by
box. Also specify the direction, Left or Right, with the appropriate option
button. Then click the blue button Perform
Horizontal Shift. (Note that before shifting left you
need to remove any notes from the leftmost bars which will be dropped off).
- Vertical Shift
This feature allows you to move all notes in a specified region, up or down
by a specified scale interval. It is different from the Transpose feature,
because it stays within the same key. For example, you may move every note
up by a second by typing 2 into the drop-down box. So in the key of C
major, all Cs will become Ds, all Ds become Es, and so on. The
permissible range of a vertical shift is from 2 or a second (i.e up or
down one step of the scale) up to 7 (i.e. up or down a seventh). This
feature could be useful when generating musical sequences, in which a pattern
of notes is repeated but at a determined interval from the first occurrence.
After specifying the direction (up or down) and the required interval, click
the yellow button Perform
Vertical Shift.
- Transpose This is
a simple feature for transposing a tune into a different key. Specify the
number of semi-tones to move, and the direction (up or down). Then click the
green button Perform Transpose.
- Bulk Parameter Changes
(Note this only applies to a single track at a time). This feature makes bulk changes to volume, instrument,
channel, duration, or track parameters. Tick one or more of the check boxes for
the types of operation desired, and fill in the new values for each
parameter. Then click the pink
button Perform Bulk Changes. For example, to
change the instrument for all notes in the specified range of bars, and the
specified track, check Change Instrument, then select a new
instrument from the drop-down list of instruments below the check box.
The volume may be changed to an absolute value, such as 127, which is the
loudest possible, in which case all notes in the specified bar range will
have their volume set to 127. Alternatively, the volume may be set to a
percentage of the current volume for each note. The duration is
measured in crotchets or quarter notes. One use of this might be to make all
notes in a certain range become staccato, by shortening their durations to
0.1 or something similarly short. The track number changes can
be useful when you need to re-order the tracks, perhaps put the violins into
track 1 and the piano into track 2.
After making changes, and listening to the result, don't forget to save the
tune to disk. This can be done from the menu, File - Save Musical Discovery
File to Disk. Or else, you may wish to save this as a fragment, which
will appear as an icon on the Composing Board. Do this by clicking the purple
button Store as fragment for use in composing board, which is
at the top right corner of the screen. (Fragments are
accumulated into a special collection in memory, so that they may be used on the
Composing Board, which allows you to assemble a
complete piece of music from many fragments, arranged in a suitable pattern. The
composing Board is available from the menu Create - Compositions - Fragment
Extraction from a Melody.)
ComposeBulkChanges.htm
Thursday, 16 November 2006 10:35