Display note counts

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sonic8or
Posts: 1

Post by sonic8or »

I think counting is one of things I have some difficulty with. If the program recognizes the note duration, perhaps it could also display the count of the notes for me to count along with when playing?
wacher
Posts: 30

Post by wacher »

+1 vote for this
I think good information if you have more version of same title (see my arranger display request too).
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Which sort of count were you looking for? Like, a "1" for whole note, "2" for half note? Something like that? Or the inverse: the number of beats, like "4" for whole note, etc.?

With all the poorly quantized MIDI out there (where you end up with a note that is technically, say, 1.87 beats long) Synthesia would have to do some rounding. Which count should be given for triplets?
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

I was thinking they were looking for a visual metronome

1 2 3 4 1 2 ....

And if that is what was being asked for, I'd add the suggestion of an audible count to help with learning to count aloud while playing. Pedagogically my concern with Synthesia is that it can make you dependent on visual cues. I think being able to play purely based on sound should be a goal and an audible count might be a step along that path.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

When you say "audible count" you aren't just talking about metronome ticks, are you? If it's an audio file with a human speaking "1 ee and uh", etc. I wonder if we'd end up with as many requests for variations as there are in the note labels list! :lol:

Worse: times the number of languages Synthesia supports! :shock: (Although, I admit it would be fun to switch over to, say, Russian counting and play that way for a while.)

This would also dredge up the technical issue of latency again, where your keyboard's output timing differs from your computer/tablet's audio subsystem. This is a nice, fixed interval though. So it could be tweaked via some +/- millisecond offset the same way the metronome can be today.
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

Nicholas wrote:When you say "audible count" you aren't just talking about metronome ticks, are you?
Right. But I hadn't thought about the international implications. My bad. :oops:
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I don't think it's an insurmountable problem. (Especially for as interesting and useful a feature.) They'd just have to be community-supplied.

I would hem and haw about having to add general-purpose sound output to all versions of Synthesia (finally breaking our excuse of "Synthesia only deals in MIDI messages..."), but I've recently been considering doing precisely that in order to introduce a more reliable/uniform synth. (FluidSynth is still on my radar but the LGPL has some weird implications on the tablet platforms where app packages are signed: they sort-of break the re-linking clause because end-users can't resign the packages with the same signature after replacing the library. It's still a not-established-yet-in-court, hazy gray area at the moment.)
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