Meter Specification for Rhythm

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Trial specification. Currently we specify primary and secondary notes 
indirectly by specifying parameters for highPitch and lowPitch, as well as 
beatPerMeasure. This works fine for simple meters (4/4 3/4 , etc.) , but 
doesn’t allow for some of the more complicated stuff we are planning (i.e. 
7/8).  I was thinking it might be useful in the long run to switch to a new 
format that specifies P(rimary), S(econdary), and T(ertiary) levels of accents, 
silence, and a probe tone in the following way (from a parsing perspective, it 
would be good to simply ignore spaces and capital letters so we can use them as 
needed for visual cleanliness):

P s s s P s s s P s s s P _ _ _ *  
Three measures of timekeeping, 4/4 meter (current setup)

P s s P s s P s s P _ _ *  
Three measure of timekeeping, 3/4 meter

P t S t S t t       P t s t s t t      P _ _ _ _ _ _ *  
Two measures of timekeeping; 7 /8 meter

The levels needed are:
    Primary (p)
    Secondary (s)
    Tertiary (t)
    Silence (_)
    Probe tone (*)  [or it could be something else if that is a reserved character]

Each class of tone gets specified with
Pitch
Velocity
Duration (assume 0 unless otherwise specified)

There should be default values of
    X for pitch
    64 for velocity
    0 for duration (only needed for piano/wind tones)

This would allow for many more possibilities, both for mixing up the metric 
structure as well as some other things we have been dreaming up. 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by guse...@datamininglab.com on 2 Oct 2013 at 3:17

• Blocking: #13

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Original comment by guse...@datamininglab.com on 2 Oct 2013 at 3:24

• Added labels: Component-Media

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Original comment by guse...@datamininglab.com on 2 Oct 2013 at 3:30

• Changed state: New

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Original comment by guse...@datamininglab.com on 2 Oct 2013 at 4:27

• Now blocking: #13

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Original comment by guse...@datamininglab.com on 2 Oct 2013 at 4:29

• Added labels: Milestone-Transition

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Could you please explain what is meant by 'duration' of a tone? Is this to be 
understood as the number of milliseconds to play the note, or as some 
percentage of the base inter-onset interval, or as something else?

What does 'X' as the default value for pitch mean? Does this mean silent, or 
should it be defaulted to something like a C4?

Also, should the probe tone be defaulted to the same values as the primary 
tone, if unspecified?

Original comment by zach.br...@datamininglab.com on 15 Oct 2013 at 9:36

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Re: duration - MIDI typically uses separate messages for note on and note off.  
I'm not 100% sure how this works for the woodblock tones we use (specifying an 
offset time would be irrelevant for a percussive note).  At some point, we 
might be using piano tones, in which case we would need to specify duration 
(which would be simply the delay between when the onset and offset messages are 
sent.  So if we can specify this in ms (i.e. 500) then that would be great.  If 
it's significantly easier to specify it in terms of a beat duration (i.e. 1 
beat) then that is fine too. 

X just meant to use our current sound of G4 for the default  (sorry, this was 
very unclear)

Probe - This should default to the accented note parameters if unspecified 

Original comment by schutz.m...@gmail.com on 17 Oct 2013 at 2:00

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Should we support both the old format and this new format?

Original comment by guse...@datamininglab.com on 18 Oct 2013 at 2:33

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Yes, it would be good if we could support both formats.  Since we have another 
point dealing with possibly adding in the ability to read info from a MIDI file 
(Issue ID-7) then we can simply have some kind of variable denoting which 
"style" of input we are using

Original comment by schutz.m...@gmail.com on 19 Oct 2013 at 9:10

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Original comment by zach.br...@datamininglab.com on 23 Oct 2013 at 7:40

• Changed state: Started

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New Meter specification is added. Duration is a float value used to specify in 
terms of beat duration (relative to a baseIOI). 

Both the old format and this new one are supported, and background code for 
reading MIDI files is started. 
Style can be specified via the new trialSpecificationStyle property (possible 
values are listed in the property file).

I've included a sample rhythm.properties file to showcase the new input 
parameters. 

Original comment by zach.br...@datamininglab.com on 23 Oct 2013 at 10:00

• Changed state: Fixed

Attachments:

• rhythm.properties