gam@amdahl.UUCP (gam) (02/12/85)
I bought Great Wave's ConcertWare 1.1 a few weeks ago, after much
frustration with Hayden's MusicWorks (64 measure limit?! Forget it!).
I am not a musician by any means, but I know enough to be able
to transcribe the music and to compare it to conventional performances.
So I apologize in advance for any shakey vocabulary. I am also
not very familiar with Mac terminology.
SUMMARY: Much better than MusicWorks, CW offers virtually unlimited
piece size, varying dynamics, and instrument shaping. Not only
is it better than MW -- it's $20 cheaper. The unfortunate thing
is that some aspects of the user interface are not so good, making
one hope for a collaborative effort between Great Wave and Hayden.
FUNCTIONAL PARTS: CW is actually three programs, the Writer and
Player and the Instrument Maker. The Writer is for music entry,
the Player for playback, and the Instrument Maker is for designing
your own instruments for playback. It also comes with numerous
example pieces (~1.5 hours worth), and about 2 dozen instruments.
There is but 2K left on the product disk (moving the three programs
to another disk allows adequate working room).
WRITER: As I mentioned before, I consider 64 measures an unreasonable
constraint on a music synthesizer. CW exceeds that limit nicely. How
about 32768 (yes, *that* number) notes? per *voice*? I was told that
32768 sixteenth notes amounts to a *few hours* of playing time on
CW.
Music entry is the most important part of the system, since that is
where I am spending the most time interacting with the Mac.
CW takes a different approach from MW; they have a non-moving template
of all possible note positions, and notes are added behind
the cursor by clicking the desired note.
Note duration is determined by the current duration selected,
making it easy to enter several notes of the same
duration. A rest is entered by clicking the 'rest' panel, and
the current duration determines the length of the rest. Durations
range from sixteenths to dotted-wholes (!).
There are, of course, four voices. The first voice, however,
determines the tempo, key and time signature for the piece.
Tempo is noted in the quarter-note-equals-N notation. The key is
selected in another panel; if you don't know your keys you can click
them on one by one until the number of sharps/flats looks right.
Time signature is selected in two parts: the numerator can be
any integer from 1 to 12, the denominator can be one of 2, 4 or 8.
There are two display options. A split-screen option shows
in the top half the current voice, in the bottom half all
four voices, all in standard music notation. The 'big'
option shows either one or all voices. I found the
split-screen option preferable for music entry. The big
screen was hard to follow.
Finally, you can have two different endings for a particular
section of music. By braketing it in repeat bars, a section
of music can be followed by two endings. The first playing will
end with the first ending, go back to the start of the section
and repeat, ending with the second ending. The music may
continue on from there and have further repeats as well.
There is a feature from MW that I'd like to have had in CW:
If you enter a note in a position such that it is preceded by several
empty measures, MW fills the empty measures with rests. CW does
not do this, making such padding (as for a voice which does not begin
until well into a piece) tedious.
Otherwise, some very handy editing features are available: cut-and-
paste, copy, shift-by-octave, shift-by-half-step. These operate
on arbitrarily sized chunks of music. Any groups of notes can
be slurred, and there is a nice 'remove-slur' command as well.
All the music being done, you can also provide a 'header', which
is displayed by the Player when the music is played. There are
lines for Title and Composer, and three lines for 'Information'
(perhaps interesting anecdotes or historical information).
PLAYER: Ah, the fun part. Once you have some music to play,
you now assign instruments to the four voices. There is a
default voice which is pleasant enough, but certain pieces sound
better when instruments of different timbres are played together --
and the 'piano' sounds quite piano-like! The instrument selection
is tied to the music being played, and will be saved with it
(on request).
Another bummer, though: the visual representation of the music
played is not standard music notation, but varying-length line
segments on a musical staff. Worse, these line segments are
not displayed until the point at which they are played. The
display area is a wrap-around window with a vertical line
passing over the staff, erasing what was ahead of it and generating
the just-played line segments behind. This is useless, to my mind.
I like to see what's coming so I can anticipate it and learn
what this display of notes sounds like, to get to a point to
recognizing it before it is played (this is a learning tool for
me, you see).
Another fault here is that certain instrument variations --
violin pizzicato, for example -- are not available on a
section-by-section basis. That is, either the WHOLE piece
is pizzicato, or it isn't at all. So instruments are tied to
voices as well. This is probably the biggest short-comming
of CW.
INSTRUMENT MAKER: This is probably CW's biggest plus! Instruments
can be designed by choosing various relative quantities of the
first twenty harmonics, and by drawing a sound envelope. I'm not
terribly knowledgible in this area, either, but suffice it to
say you have a lot of choices of what you want your synthetic
instruments to sound like. There is a piano keyboard at the
bottom to demonstrate the currently described instrument.
Instruments can also be defined by freehand drawing of the
sound curve, but this usually isn't very interesting. The
sound envelope is always drawn freehand, and this is frustrating,
both because freehanded drawing is not my forte (is that a pun?)
and because the window for drawing is rather small, making my
handicap that much worse.
In the Player, each voice is represented by the instrument associated
with it. The icon of an instrument is drawn in the Instrument
Maker, using the usual on/off-bit method. You can use any existing
instrument icon as a model. Also any existing instrument can be
used as the basis for a new one (I made a xylophone from a harpsichord!).
POST-SUMMARY: I think ConcertWare is great. If you are considering
getting a music-synthesis package for Mac, buy this one. I promised
the Great Wave folks I would send back my review of their product,
which will be the same as this article. I'll report on any responses
recieved from them. Hopefully some of the weaker areas can be
corrected in future releases/updates.
AFTERWARD: If there's any major area I've left out or other things
you'd like to know, drop me a line. I'll post answers to very
popular questions to the net.
--
Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!gamgam@amdahl.UUCP (gam) (02/19/85)
I neglected to mention the price for ConcertWare 1.1: $49.95.
Also I have received a few requests for how to find ConcertWare.
I bought it direct from them; I don't know who else is selling
it. Here is their address/phone:
Great Wave Software (this is from an ad in MacWorld)
P O Box 5847 (January 1985, pg 173)
Stanford, CA 94305
(415) 852-2280 (CA residents add 6.5% tax)
I also neglected to mention another nice feature of ConcertWare:
varying dynamics. You can specify (pp, p, mp, f, mf, ff) in any
of the four voices at any time.
{ I'm not paid by Great Wave to say all these nice things but I think }
{ they are nice people }
--
Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!gam