A nice day yesterday, as I finally finished the recent work on the music scores, so these are now complete. I've been thinking of ways to expand Prometheus to 10-octaves. It's not difficult, but would increase the memory of every song by 193,608 bytes for the look-up tables. This is relative small-fry, a one-second sample with no interpolation is about the same.
It would invalidate the song format, so would mean a 5th update to the file format. The upgrade procedure is fairly simple though. The big two downsides to an upgrade are:
1. The larger memory/file size requirement. 193k isn't much, but I rarely need, indeed have never wanted, more than 5 octaves, so it's making more space for little benefit - the main reason is to expand the potential range to (most of) MIDI standard for import/export reasons. When it's there, I might use the greater range, though.
2. This many octaves might need more complexity regarding ease of use. Selecting 0-1, 1-2, 2-3 can be done at a keypress now. That will change. This the most minor point.
It's been a slow day. I spent yesterday evening looking at a song called Song For Zimmerman written for the Dylan concert on the 23rd. It's just words, so I looked into adding music, and did with a few simple chords, but there are annoying problems.
First, the music is very simple and just uses three chords. This can be fine for trying it out, but I'd prefer something musically better - but I used the simplicity to get the guitar out and have spent a lot of today strumming the tune. It sounds pretty... but I'd need a lot more practice to get up to speed, AND it would be getting up to speed on a simple 3-chord tune. It doesn't really scan well enough, and I'm not fluent enough at playing the guitar to make the result impressive. The words are good, I'd like the whole song to be.
I'm faced with a few choices. I can either play it on keyboard instead, where I'd find it easier to sing and play at once, or stick with guitar and use this as an opportunity to practice that instrument and skill. Or I could write a more complex melody, which would fit the words better, and use the keyboard. The words have been bent into some forms or versal structure, but they don't fit very tightly, and to bend them too much compromises their quality.
These schisms have made today frustrating.
In other news, I've sent a copy of the Salomé album to the two Nietzsche museums, for their archives. They may prefer the sheet music.
Later tonight I'm due for a gamer night with my Big-Bang-Theory-esque game friends. I'm not much of a gamer now. I generally dislike the point of it all, and generally come second to last or last in our competitions which mean nothing to me but a waste of motor skills. I'd much rather be practising a performance or art skill, this is, at least, useful.
