Saturday, May 11, 2019

A Larger Vision: one piece falls into place

Over the past couple months the scope of this project has expanded rather suddenly, from one tightly focused on enabling music based on harmonics (also representable as integer-ratio intervals) to one which is still motivated by the desire to support harmonic tonality, but which also strives to be more generally useful. This means more work, but also something I might actually be proud to release into the world, if and when I get it into a state where it's ready for that.

One result of this reconceptualization is that I'll be repurposing the term "base frequency" from "an intermediary object which may be used in conjunction with the anchor, providing the scalar factor" to something more concrete, the sample rate divided by size of one or more lookup tables used to represent wave forms that aren't easily calculated on the fly, for example sine waves. As such it will be a minor detail of the implementation, not something user-facing, except as the user might be a programmer working with a framework, if that turns out to be the direction the project evolves.

(Update, 06June2019: At this time, ALL custom terminology should be considered temporary and subject to redefinition, replacement, or deprecation. If/when this all stabilizes, I'll post an updated lexicon.)