Scratch
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#1 2008-08-28 21:55:56
scratch's musical limitations?
So I'm new to using scratch and one the first thing about it that interests me is that ability to program music into it by individually setting notes and beats. Now, I have decent musical knowledge yet when I have several instruments in seperate scripts playing at once they seem to get off each other a lot. I've checked the beats and mathematically they should line up so I'm wondering, is Scratch not set up to handle 4+ string orchestral parts playing at once?
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#2 2008-08-28 21:58:07
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- Registered: 2008-01-24
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Re: scratch's musical limitations?
Scratch's loops and what not (like the pauses and rests) get messed up and whack. It should line up, but it doesn't. Jens should know this. He made the Trio and Jubilate. Try asking him.
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#3 2008-08-29 01:53:14
Re: scratch's musical limitations?
Hi Aralous, it's great that you love experimenting with Scratch's musical abilities. It is something I enjoy very much, too. In fact, music on Scratch is almost my secret favorite 
The problem - as far as I can see - is not so much that "Scratch" gets "off", but that Scratch is in fact a programming environment with musical capabilities, and not a sheet-music composition tool. That is, if you use Scratch's blocks to let it perfom music, you're not just using the musical blocks, but other commands as well (loops, event-hats, graphical stuff, motion etc.). You have to remember, that Scratch is not a metronomically "tacted" or timed environment, so you have to program this "time-frame" yourself. This usually works best if you synchronize your music frequently with broadcast messages. You're very welcome to check out and remix some of my own musical projects to get a feel for this synchroniziation.
Jens Mönig
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#5 2008-09-01 00:46:35
Re: scratch's musical limitations?
Thanks for the help. I tested the broadcast command on a part that was giving me trouble and it seems to work better this way. Now it's just a matter of going back through and finding all the parts where I need to add a broadcast message in. Thanks again.
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#7 2008-09-01 02:54:24
Re: scratch's musical limitations?
Well, dingdong, of course "music making programs" will be much better at making music than Scratch, just as photoshop will be much better at manipulating graphics than Scratch, but which programming languages do you know that make programming polyphonic music easy? I remember Visual Basic wasn't that bad, and Smalltalk's musical part isn't exactly easy. Of course I wouldn't know about flash, greenfoot or Alice...
Jens Mönig
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