Tune Smithy - music generator and microtonal composition tool

All the following features are available when you download my Fractal Tune Smithy music generator and microtonal composition tool. Look for them in its Tasks folder on your desktop after the install.

Find out about the use of the Lambdoma keyboard in music therapy, and play in the Lambdoma tone array using your mouse, PC keyboard or Barbara Hero's hardware Lambdoma keyboard - see Lambdoma Music Therapy (click here)

Show Lissajous patterns for the chords you play - see Lissajous Patterns

Explore microtonal music - see Microtonal Explorations

Play in any tuning from your music keyboard - see Retune music keyboard

Add microtonal capabilities to your composing software by using the retuning faculties in FTS - see Microtonal features for composers

Play midi clips in any tuning - see Retuning Midi File Player

Try out an incredible range of tunings - historical baroque tunings, Gamelan tunings, Indian music, tunings based on vertex patterns of 3D shapes, and other special ones invented by modern scale designers- see Microtonal Scales and Tunings

Practice ordinary simple and compound rhythms, complex polyrhythms (several contrasting rhythms played at once such as three and four beats in the same bar), and long bars (hypermeasures) - see Polyrhythm Metronome

Play chord progressions such as the ones you see in web sites about chords - in any tuning you like of course - you can copy / paste most chord progressions from other web sites directly into the player and click the play button to hear them immediately - or set a rhythm to create a backing track for practice - see Chord Player

Explore the tune generating capabilities of Fractal Tune Smithy - create beautiful snowflake like fractal music - and compose new tunes effortlessly by varying the parameters of the example tunes. This is suitable for complete beginners to music and composition, advanced algo-comp enthusiasts - or as a source to generate new melodic ideas - see Create Tunes that play endlessly

Send a musical e-card to a friend - see Musical e-cards

Use your mouse and p.c. keyboard as musical instruments - see Mouse & P.c. keyboard music

Move the mouse around to play a theremin with many advanced features (the theremin is that instrument that you play just by waving your hands in the air). You can also play the theremin using the PC keyboard to change the speed and direction of the theremin mouse cursor. See Mouse & Joystick Theremin.

Transcribe bird song or microtonal solo lines and export the transcription as a MIDI file - see Audio Pitch Tracer

Analyse the sound of a musical instrument or chord to high pitch accuracy - useful for microtonal enthusiasts who are willing to spend some time tweaking it to get the best results - see Sounds Harmonic Analysis

Use the waveform player to make audio clips of your chords directly as audio files - see Chord Synthesis

Explore the capabilities of CSound with ease - a music synthesis system that has until now had a reputation of being hard to use as it required programming skills. Tune Smithy's innovative automated C-Sound orchestra-builder lets you just choose the C-Sound instruments from a drop-list, much as you would with a normal midi instrument - see CSound.

Use the new inbuilt waveform player as a source of new pure harmonic timbre type sounds. It explores some of the sounds you can make by repeating a short segment of the curve for any mathematical formulae in various ways, which is an unusual approach in this field, so may give new sounds for composers.

It's other speciality is that it plays frequencies with extreme precision (exact to fifteen decimal places or so). It can be a useful alternative to your sample player or soundcard when you want the notes to be particularly precisely pitched.

The preset instruments can just be selected from a menu. Also you can tweak the parameters - and if you have some basic maths awareness, you can also use it to make new waves yourself - see Waveform player .

Do microtonal calculations with the inbuilt Calculator - just enter any sum, or formula and it will instantly calculate the result. It's strong point is that it is particularly designed for use with scale calculations involving cents, ratios etc. See Calculator

Of all my programs, this is the most TARDIS like

"Even after quite a few hours delving into this Tardis of a utility, I felt there was still lots more to explore, and while this does make Fractal Tune Smithy rather overwhelming at first sight, you're unlikely to get bored with it."

Review in Sound on Sound, October 04