Transformation - randomize pitches?

I am so thrilled with Dorico 4! All of these little workflow improvements add up to quite an astonishing package!

One little bit I would love to see expanded is a randomize/shuffle option for transforming pitches. As an educator, I create worksheets, and shuffling pitches can be an easy way to make sure I use the same pitches every time in a different order. It doesn’t look like that’s currently possible, so I’m writing this up in hopes it might be added in the future!

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+1 for educational purpose of sight reading

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Thanks for the suggestion. Do you want it to take all of the existing pitches and shuffle them into a random order, or do you want a completely random selection of pitches, or something else?

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For me, it would be to shuffle a selection of pitches. For instance, if I’m making a worksheet for pitch names, and I want to include each natural pitch inside the staff, I could write them out in a row, select them, and then click “shuffle/randomize pitches” and it would easily create a new line that I didn’t have to double-check to make sure I had included every pitch.

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.
Often I go off to create random note flash cards from this page to make them:
https://www.dcode.fr/permutations-generator
and if I also want repeats

https://www.dcode.fr/permutations-with-repetitions

and sometimes I create from custom items list with a javascript script that I wrote
But no need to go so far, and in general your ideas are perfect and better :wink:
Dup

Could be a shuffle rhythm as well? And Map pitches to rhythm. Like all 8-notes to C, 16-notes to G… and rhythm to pitches. All C to 8-notes…

Jesper

And permutations.

It would be great to be able to give a pitch interval (or a set of pitches) and get random pitches of that interval (or set) for a given rhythm. It would be also great to have options such as (1) avoid contiguous repeated pitches, or (2) give a weight to each pitch, so you can control the relative amount of times that each pitch appears.
By the way, congratulations for the update!

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This is quite easily handled in python using music21 and/or scamp. From there you can create either xml or midi to import into Dorico. The benefit of this approach is that you are in total control, rather than expecting the Dorico team to second guess your composition process.

Here’s a file that achieves part 1 of your challenge
rand-pitch1.zip (566 Bytes)

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Thank you Janus for the comment and the file. I understand your point.
In any case, it is very useful to have this simple tools available in the notation software. Maybe, to give weights to the notes is too much for the “normal” user, but I think that a random choice of notes is simple enough to implement it as a part of the program. I like to compose directly in Dorico and I am afraid that using another program just for making this kind of things would break my workflow considerably.

I would love to have to scramble the selected pitches (random order)! I’m working with this a lot but still have to do it by hand or in Max.

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Could randomisation functions be implemented similar to their implementation in midi focussed music programs such as Live or Logic? For example, could a composer choose to independently randomise, duration, whether a note plays or is tacit (replaced by a rest), dynamic marking, octave and pitch class?

It would be ideal if random parameters could be defined so that pitch-classes can be limited to a particular tonality system, octaves can be limited to the range of an instrument and a gamut of rhythmic values can be specified etc. A set of definable randomisation tools such as this would have immense utility inside scoring software.

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