Microtonality

Hello,
Any news about the ability to write and play microtonal intervals as in Dorico for Desktop?
Thanks.

Could you be more specific? What news are you looking for? Iā€™ve been doing work in half a dozen different microtonal systems so far.

In the iPad version?

Sorry, I missed the little word ā€œasā€ in the OP (and the iPad tag on the thread).

On the iPad, microtonal accidentals appear (HEJI in my case) but they do not play back; everything is rounded to the nearest half step. EDIT - I havenā€™t tried creating microtonal accidentals on the iPad, just opening them from the desktop version.

Yes. In the first days of Dorico for iPad, I wrote in the Appstore a laudatory review in which I asked for microtonality integration. I had an answer from Dev talking about microtonality ā€˜in futureā€™. So I wonder if it is soon possible to write and hear microtones with integrated instruments (and maybe AuV3 instruments).

As someone desperately hoping microtonality will be pervasive in all the sound players, at the moment Iā€™ve only found NotePerformer that can smoothly work with microtones in Dorico.

Are there other sound players that can do it as well? And, how would it work on the iPad?

Paolo

Yes. You have The Grand from Steinberg and Pianoteq from Modartt. Both really fine.
But my question above was about the iPad version where microtonality is not (yet) implemented.

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I love how the instruments that are more unlikely to be (freely) detuned for a live performance are the only ones that are well supported! :grin:

Paolo

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In order to support microtonal playback in Dorico for iPad, we would need to implement microtonal playback via MIDI pitch bend. This is certainly something we may do in future for both Dorico on the desktop and on the iPad, but itā€™s not imminent.

Thank you for being frank, @dspreadbury . Not a good news, but who knows, maybe it will arrive sooner than expectedā€¦

A great help, in the meantime, would be to be able to create expression map addons based on Pitch Bend. This would be like adding hidden accidentals, attached to the note.

Paolo

Rather Note Expression or equivalent, with Tuning parameter. Is it possible on iPadOS?

No, itā€™s not possible at the moment: Dorico for iPad uses AUv3 rather than VST3, and Note Expression is not part of the AUv3 protocol at the moment (though with the arrival of MPE in MIDI 2.0 I guess we will start to see plug-ins that support it).

Iā€™d like to add to the request chorus! I use MultiTrackStudio for iPad, which quite happily outputs MPE to ROLI Noise, for example. I was trying out Dorico to see if I could get decent notation writing on the go, but the lack of even 24EDO support on playback is a killer.

Even if it was only supported by the built-in instruments, it would be enough to hear my scores and export the MIDI to a DAW when ready later.

thereā€™s a number of AUv3s that support MPE. Quanta and Drambo for instance. Iā€™m hoping Pianoteq will also support MPE. If MPE could be enabled somehow for microtonality and for glissandos, thatā€™d make Dorico for iPad much more fun.

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Is there any update about this?. Microtonal playback via MIDI pitch bend is now implemented in Dorico 5 :wink:

I donā€™t think the basic sounds included with Dorico for iPad respond to MIDI pitch bend, Iā€™m afraid, but we do plan to provide better sounds for the iPad version in future, at which point this may well become possible.

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In Multitrack studio, you can set the pitchbend range at your convenience and write its value in cents manually in a per-note basis. You can even snap the message (a dot) at the beginning of each note you want to process. It works fine with Pianoteq but, of course, MTS is not a score editor and operation is tediousā€¦ but it works.

I reply to myself: I can see that, in Dorico 5, we can play microtonal intervals with Kontakt instruments (in fact by every instrument responding to per-note pitchbend) thanks to new expressionmap data functions.
So we will surely be able to do the same in Dorico-for-iPad very very very soon (with microsonic or AUV3 instruments).
Am I wrong?

Microsonic doesnā€™t handle MIDI pitch bend, so unfortunately thatā€™s not an option. But in future it may be possible with other playback devices, yes. At the present time thereā€™s no way to edit expression maps in Dorico for iPad, so you donā€™t have any way to set this up directly in the iPad version, but if you have access to Dorico on macOS or Windows you could create an expression map and then use the project containing that expression map as a template for Dorico for iPad.

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