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Monthly Archives: August 2012

Set your Android Notification Sound

I’m using 2.3.4, so I don’t know if this works for other people.  I wanted to change my notification sound to the little chime in Zelda games that plays when you find a secret, but it’s not at all obvious how to do it.  Turns out you have to make a folder on your SD card called “notifications” and put your sound file there, and it shows up.  “alarms” and “ringtones” will do the same for alarm and ringtone sound files.  It’s an easy fix, but you’d think they’d have a more obvious interface for it.  ::shrugs::

19-Tone Equal Temperament: a Diatonic Tuning

I have just recently written a Sibelius plugin that allows playback in 19-tone equal temperament, Offtonic 19-TET.  The 19-tone scale has also been available on the Offtonic Microtonal Synthesizer since its creation.  So what is it?  What is it about?  What is the deal with 19-tone equal temperament, or 19-TET?

To begin with, there are many ways to generate an EDO, an Equal Division of the Octave.  The most obvious way is to simply divide the octave into n equal parts, and voilà, n-TET.  You can think of this as starting from note 0 and adding 1 each time, and when you get to n, that’s really the same as note 0.  For example, in 12-TET, I can start at C:

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Offtonic 19-TET Plugin for Sibelius, and Remove MIDI Pitch Bends

Two more plugins; get them here!

UPDATE: You can also get them at the Sibelius website here and here.

Remove MIDI Pitch Bends just removes MIDI pitch bends, which is pretty useful if you bend a lot of pitches.  Offtonic 19-TET, on the other hand, is, in my humble opinion, a giant leap for microtonal composition!  …OK, my opinion may not be so humble.  It is, however, very cool, at least to a microtonal nerd like myself.  I’ll analyze the 19-TET scale in detail in a later post, with musical examples that I created using this very plugin, but for now, enjoy composing in 12-TET’s closest microtonal cousin!

Normally I’d also talk about the challenges I faced when writing these plugins, but honestly, it wasn’t so hard.  I looked at existing plugins to get an idea of the idioms, I looked at the .plg file in a text editor to see how the script was stored, and I wrote.  I would, however, be very glad to answer any questions about ManuScript, the plugin language.  Don’t be afraid to ask in the comments.