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MIDI file accompaniment ?

Antescofo
#1

Hello,

Please forgive what must be a stupid question… I would like to use Antescofo to play a MIDI file accompaniment along with a soloist part, so the accompaniment MIDI output will follow the live input. I’ve looked at all the tutorials and documentation and don’t find how to load a MIDI file accompaniment (as a group action or whatever it should be called). I have created the soloist .txt score and have following working fine, but I don’t know how to load the MIDI accompaniment score file to be able to follow the live input. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

On a slightly related note, I notice that Ascograph is no longer included in the Forum distribution of Antescofo. Is it not needed anymore? But then how does one view a score? I have placed an older copy of Ascograph 0.2.8 in the search path and that seems to work (with the odd crash), but perhaps this is not the right thing to do?

Thank you for your help!
Alan Thomas

#2

It would be great to have a good answer to your question!

#3

Hi @aethomas and sorry for the long delay in response (holiday times) and Happy new year in advance (everybody!). :slight_smile:

Having MIDI accompaniments with Antescofo in Max or PureData boils down to writing MIDI messages, per channel and in groups, along your Antescofo score that contains NOTE, CHORDetc that your main instrument will play. How to organize this is actually left to your own discretion as Antescofo allows different synchronisation mecanisms (such as starting phrases together or synchronising phrases at the end of the main line etc etc). This ofcourse depends on the musical structure of the piece. We tried to provide powerful mecanisms in the language to allow you all this.

We actually made a very simple MIDI Accompaniment importer using the Antescofo Importer. You can download Antescofo Importer separately here: http://forumnet.ircam.fr/shop/en/beta.php?id_product=44&beta=1 It is also embedded in AscoGraph (whenever you drag-n-drop a MusicXML or MIDI it’ll be called!).
The Accompaniment importer is only available for MIDI files. It’ll ask you which track you want as main or accompaniment tracks and it’ll propose a basic score structure that should work right away with the Help patch of Antescofo. You can then organize your messages to better reflect your score. Ofcourse all this is experimental for now.

As for your Ascograph Status: When we made Ascograph a few years ago, the goal was to provide a simple visualisation of Antescofo scores and we made it independent. The software doesn’t actually compile on latest OSX and we are far from being UI experts to fix this! We probably made wrong development decisions for the dependencies at the time! To make it short: If it works then hurray but if it doesn’t, fixing it will take much more time for us. We are studying alternatives using more available technologies like Python on Web.

If anyone is interested, we can make this an OpenSource project and take it from there collectively.

Let me know if I didn’t answer your question.

PS: Here is a collection of useful posts on different ways of using Antescofo: http://forumnet.ircam.fr/user-groups/antescofo/forum/topic/antescofo-useful-tutorials-on-this-forum/

#4

Many thanks, Arshia. That was helpful, and I can see that the important thing is to develop a better understanding of how score code should be structured. I’ve actually got it working now for this MIDI accompaniment purpose, and for anyone interested in using Antescofo in this way I would suggest having a look at the “Handel_Flute_Gavotte.txt” score on the forum. From this file you can see how to place the code for the accompaniment group action.

Thanks again!
Alan

#5

Thanks for letting us know Alan!

If you run into situations of optimizing the behavior of the accompaniment (that is how your messages are sent in reaction to the musician’s placement and tempo) don’t hesitate to write back! We have a full coverage of synchronization strategies which lack examples for better understanding.

Cheers and happy nez year.

Arshia

#6

A simple approach would be to continuously adjust the tempo of a sequencer sub-patch in Max which plays back the accompaniment from a MIDI file. But it will probably less accurate than sending the MIDI messages from within the Antescofo score.

Happy new year to all of you!

#7

Alan,
Where can we find “Handel_Flute_Gavotte.txt”?
I would like to see and download it. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the file on the forum.
Thanks,
Ionel

#8

Alan,

Happy New Year 2019!

Where can we find “Handel_Flute_Gavotte.txt”?
I would like to see and download it. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the file on the forum.

Thanks,
Ionel

#9

Hello Ionel,

Happy New Year to you too!

You can find the Handel Gavotte file in a post by Arshia on the following page:

http://www.forum.ircam.fr/fr/members/arshiacont/forums/replies/page/6/

The starting point for me was loading this score file into Ascograph within the antescofo midi help file and looking at the code and how the whole thing works. It’s surprisingly simple to use Antescofo in this way, and to me seems really cool and full of possibilities even though it uses only a tiny fraction of the language’s capabilities.

Good luck!
Alan

#10

Thank you Alan and Arshia!
Best,
Ionel