source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 08:37:55 -0800 Subject: From Brian McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: An amazing achievement -- Congratulations to Manuel Op de Coul on a magnificent achievement. His latest upgrade of the tuning program SCALA more than fulfills the promise of the earlier versions of the program. As some of you may know, SCALA is a program which allows users to design, alter, combine, stretch, and transmute tunings in a variety of ways. SCALA includes a vast cornucopia of scale generation methods: cyclic, equal-tempered (octave and non-octave), polynomial, Wilson CPS permutation, Pythagorean, and many others. However, SCALA is not merely a tuning program. It includes an entire programming language which allows you to write command scripts which execute automatically and write huge numbers to disk. So it's not really accurate to call SCALA a "program"-- it's an entire tuning programming language. Nothing like SCALA has ever existed before. Prior attempts, like the excellent JiCalc, forced users to enter each scale-step one at a time, and shackled users with severe constraints: only 60 scale-steps could be entered, all steps had to be specified as just ratios (a very bizarre requirement if your scale in a non-just non-equal-tempered tuning!), and so on. However, Manuel Op de Coul's SCALA overcomes all these limitations. I must admit that previous versions of SCALA did not work with any of my MIDI cards. Perhaps it was my setup, or perhaps my cards, or perhaps it was the older versions of the program--but I had never succeeded in transmitting a tuning to any of my synthesizers. However, the latest version of SCALA transmits tunings to my synthesizers quickly and easily. The program works with perfect transparency: you simply follow Manuel's command script, the synth is retuned...it's that simple. SCALA is even *easier* to use than the Mac application JiCalc. (Alas, those of you who own Macintoshes now know why Apple Computer will go bankrupt. None of the useful programs on the old 680X0 Macintoshes run on the garbage Power Macs. If you want to run JiCalc, here's a piece of advice: buy an old Mac Plus cheap at a swap meet and use it run JiCalc. Otherwise, you're out of luck.) SCALA is a remarkable accomplishment. It is one of the most important developments in the post-1983 modern era of retunable MIDI synthesizers. Congratulations on a job well done, Manuel. --mclaren Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 5 Dec 1996 23:16 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA21775; Thu, 5 Dec 1996 18:52:22 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA20944 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id JAA25865; Thu, 5 Dec 1996 09:52:13 -0800 Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 09:52:13 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu