/ Topics / Authoring Musical Notes

Wherein we discuss Hz's options for representing musical notes in your compositions.

Motivation

Most musical compositions are built atop sequences of carefully selected musical notes. In the context of a Programmable Sound System the question arises, how best to represent them?

Hz offers you several options to represent notes. These can be freely mixed and matched in your compositions.

Songs.hz Notation

Songs.hz is a notation for ergonomically expressing multi-track, multi-voice compositions replete with controls over tempo and note expressions like pan, pitch-bend, volume, etc. Hz offers the ability to author, visualize and perform songs in this notation. You can view this environment as a musical programming environment since the primary programmable components are Song, Voice, Track, Section and Sequencer. Songs.hz is not a general programming environment and therefore is much easier to master.

songs_hz:0.1.0

Song(Id:"mysong")
{
    Track(Id:"melody")
    {
        [a#3 bb3]!3
    }

}

Editing Support

Once you make the move to storing your tunes in .hz files you unlock the augmented editing capabilities in the Code Editor. To summarize:

• you can visualize your song as piano-roll while typing it.
• the code cursor causes the associated preview notes to highlight.

More details can be found here and working examples here.

JavaScript or Lua program

To achieve arbitrary programmability, Hz supports both JavaScript and Lua programming.
These are coupled with the MusicAPI and Tonal to empower you to "do anything you can imagine".

This example shows one approach to expressing musical ideas with the combination of JavaScript and our MusicAPI.

// initialize audio engine and a synth node.
let ascene = await Ascene.BeginFiber(this);
console.log("Audio scene is ready to go.");
let inst = ascene.NewAnode("Surge XT");
let dac = ascene.GetDAC();
ascene.Connect(inst, dac);
await ascene.Sync();

// request a string of notes using MIDI note numbers.
let noteDur = ascene.Seconds(1);
for(let key=40; key<=60;key++)
{
    inst.NoteOn(key, .8);
    await ascene.Wait(noteDur);
    inst.NoteOff(key, .8);
    yield;
}

It's possible to embed note-generation sequence into separate free-running (asynchronous) functions and in this way you can control multiple independent streams of notes simultaneously.

MIDI

MIDI Files store notes in a .mid file. These can be performed with the MidiFile class. MIDI files have been around for some time and are an excellent means to exchange notes with other composition tools. But because the .mid file format is binary, special tooling is required to modify them. Moreover, the range of applications of MIDI Files is fairly broad and this means that all .mid files are not created equal. There are 3 subformats, an MPE (Polyphonic Expression) extension spec and a next generation (MIDI 2) becoming more commonplace. For these reasons MIDI files may not be the best representation for storing your compositional elements.