Re: [fluid-dev] What is "tuning" good for?

[Ebrahim Mayat]

On Sunday, February 22, 2009, at 04:11AM, "Butrus Damaskus" <address@hidden> 
wrote:
>Hi!
>
>Could someone, please, explain to me, what is the "tunings" good for? I
>Greped the source and was a little bit confused of what it is aimed for.
>
>(My Idea was to implement some other tuning systems than the "Equal
>temperament" - e.g. those used in arabic music [maq?m?t] or barock organ
>music. It seems to me however, that fluidsynth allows just to set the tuning
>for a particular key AND for a particular bank/program. But it would be
>usefull to set the tuning once for everything...)
>
>Thanks!
>
>See:
> ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_maqam
> ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_tuning#Tuning_systems

This question has appeared a couple of times previously on this list. 

For universal tunings you need to interface fluidsynth with a program called 
Scala <http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala/>. Tunings for literally hundreds 
of scales can be loaded into Scala. The scale archive can be obtained from 
<http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/scales.zip>. Once you have interfaced Scala 
with fluidsynth you can dump your selected tunings to fluidsynth via MIDI pitch 
bend commands. 

You can also create your own tunings in Scala.

E