Re: Feature suggestion: Constant ratio tempo ramp

From: Joel Roth <joelz_at_pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2022 21:34:42 -1000
Oh, I meant this for a different list.

Sorry for the distraction. Have a great day!

On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 01:30:17PM -1000, Joel Roth wrote:
> Hi Midish developers,
> 
> According to Paul Davis, principal Ardour developer, studies
> show that exponential ramps are much more natural to the ear
> than linear ramps. 
> 
> AFAICT Midish uses linear ramp, changing the beat duration
> by a constant amount each beat. 
> 
> Putting it out there that someone may like to implement
> an option for exponential ramp.
> 
> Mail appended below.
> 
> Joel
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 5:27 PM Tim <termtech_at_rogers.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 1/27/22 1:08 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
> >
> > Hiya Paul. Could you explain that a bit more?
> >
> > Human exponential vs. linear, I don't quite understand.
> >
> Let's suppose you are playing the simplest of beats, let's say you just
> play a note/tone at 120bpm. There's 0.5 seconds between your playing.
> 
> To do a linear speedup, you would gradually reduce the time between notes,
> maybe like this: 0.5, 0.45, 0.40, 0.35, 0.30 and so on
> 
> Problem is, it turns out that humans (even the musical among us) are not
> very good at all at measuring absolute time. What we are good at is
> measuring relative time, and so what actually happens is that we decrease
> (or increase) the "time per note" by a constant *factor*. Let's say the
> factor is 0.1. So now, the first note of our nominal accelarando is 0.45
> long, but the next one is 0.405 then 0.3645 then 0.3285 and so forth. This
> forms a natural exponential progression.
> 
> Put a different way, human performers do not speed up or slow down by a
> constant amount per beat of an accelerando or decelerando, they speed up or
> slow down by a constant ratio.
> 
> This behavior has been noted in several research papers on human musical
> performance, and it is very, very difficult for most humans to do anything
> else.
> 
> > And can you remember which types of, or specific, plugins would fail, and
> > why? I'd like to investigate.
> >
> 
> Alas, I have no specific info on this. x42/robin gareus might know more.
> Not many plugins care about the tempo map. The ones that do have a lot of
> potential for screwing up if they come with some baked in idea of "this is
> what accelerando sounds like".
> 
> 
> -- 
> Joel Roth

-- 
Joel Roth
Received on Thu May 12 2022 - 09:34:42 CEST

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