I’ve recently been reading up on microtonality; the theories of Erv Wilson (pretty mindblowing), and ‘generalised keyboards’ like the MicroZone/Lumatone.
I’ve seen a couple of posts on other forums raising the problem of MIDI’s 128 note limit when you’re working with scales with eg 53 divisions of the octave. (The Lumatone has 288 keys. The MicroZone U990 has 810.)
One approach to this is “channel per octave”, which is apparently supported by certain plugins like Pianoteq and SurgeXT, but very few. I was slightly surprised to come across this puzzle, because I thought it was done by sending pitchbend. Would MPE-style pitchbend per-note work as an approach to this, even for non-MPE controllers…?
Yes there are a bunch of tuning plugins and several DAWs that already use MPE to achieve microtonality. These will work with software and hardware synths that have MPE support, so long as that support has been implemented properly in the instrument (eg there are some hardware MPE synths that do not follow the spec properly, by failing to act upon MPE pitch bend messages that are sent immediately before the note on messages).
Oddsound MTS-ESP - this has several different methods for achieving instrument retuning. This plugin is most famous for popularising the modern use of MIDI Tuning Standard (MTS) but I believe it has an MPE mode too: ODDSOUND
Entonal Studio (which is also available at a much lower price for iOS) is a similar story, can use MTS but also MPE: https://entonal.studio
Infinitone - same sort of story with this one I believe, but its been a while since I trialled it. https://infinitone.com
There may be others that Im not aware of. I dont have special knowledge about the MIDI note number limitation that you mention, probably because the solutions I’ve tried do get round that using MPE pitch bend. For example, Ableton 12s built in tuning system includes some examples that have a large number of divisions, eg 72-EDO and works quite well with the pads of their Push controllers.
Speaking of Ableton, when they added that stuff to version 12 they also made a website that lets you learn and explore this stuff in a web browser. A glorified marketing exercise thats pretty educational. There is an icon on the top left of the site that lets you jump into the blurb and details of a bunch of tuning systems, if you get bored of going through the site in a linear fashion. https://tuning.ableton.com
Thanks…lots to look at there, and some interesting gotchas.
I don’t know how the Lumatone works, but I guess, if it supports channel-per-octave, but not MPE-style pitchbend-per-note, it would be possible to build a converter in something like Bome…(?)
If this is a problem for Lumatone users (I get that impression), it might be solved by MIDI 2.0, since they’re keen on embracing that, and it seems to solve the microtonal problem somehow. (?) Then again, perhaps support for MIDI 2.0 in software might take a while to catch on too.
I lack Lumatone knowledge. I skimmed a section of their manual and it sounds like they are more used to pairing things with a much more limited set of 3rd party solutions, some of which were probably imagined before MPE gained traction. Eg this is mentioned in their manual: Hπ Instruments | universal tuning editor but I dont have the time to read the technical details of that one, or investigate how that solution may have evolved over time.
Yes they claim they will implement some MIDI 2.0-based solutions as soon as it is practical. But yes it will take time for a broader MIDI 2.0 ecosystem to evolve, and also there are many different aspects to MIDI 2.0 and there is no certainty about which aspects of MIDI 2.0 will be adopted by various makers of hardware and software. MIDI 2.0 has the facility to transmit very precise tuning information as part of every note on MIDI message, every time you press a key, and thats the bit that would offer a sensible solution. But its one of the least mentioned aspects of MIDI 2.0 so far, so at this stage nobody knows what adoption will be like in future.
I expect that for quite a long time to come, MPE offers by far the biggest choice of compatible synths/instruments. Synths that support MTS-ESP are in second place, support for that has gained some traction via a fair handful of notable instrument plugin developers supporting it. Other options are far more niche and bespoke and I cant say much about them due to a lack of personal experience.
The issues with quickly discovering the technical reality of Lumatone are caused by the price making it very niche, so not a lot of technical chatter online by actual users. And I dont think a community forum that was planned for 2024 came to fruition.
And their own sites mentioning of MPE tends towards the defensive. They probably had potential users asking them questions about the additional expressive dimensions of touch that MPE controllers offer, and since thats not part of their offering, they just go on about how thats not part of their vision. Their talk about a MIDI 2.0 future tends to be part of this defensive talk too, makes it sound like they are trying to bypass the whole MPE era. This is fair enough, except it gets in the way of searching for talk about the other aspect of MPE which could still be highly relevant to Lumatone, making use of per-note MPE pitch bend messages to provide a tuning solution.
In theory yes, if a device really outputs all the required info every time a note is pressed, you could convert that info into MPE messages. But it might not be trivial, and I dont know if Bome is excellent for this task - most of the realtime MPE processing and conversion work I’ve done is via my own scripting and programming, using traditional computers, languages and MIDI libraries, where I know I dont run into any additional limitations. And if the device doesnt output all of that data every time a note is pressed, you’ll end up having to build the details of the desired tuning into your own code, and the size of the mission will quickly balloon.
If I were interested in the Lumatone myself, I would probably contact Matt directly, and discuss the detail, try to have a MPE conversation that focusses on the pitch bending tuning data not the other dimensions of MPE. Maybe this has already been solved for all I know, or several existing solutions could be glued together to get the desired result, but I dont have the time to do more research on this.
I did a little bit more Lumatone digging and I was deeply unimpressed.
Heavy on promises in videos when it came to extra editor functionality, community-generated online mappings site, low on actual progress in any of these respects despite the years flying by. I am left with no sense of momentum.
It looks to me that when it comes to microtonality, theres really nothing built in, 3rd party stuff does all the work. Talk about a missed opportunity. You’ll either have to use tuning stuff built into certain instruments, or use the sort of solutions I linked to in my initial post, to get microtonal results. On its own, theres no tuning data coming out of the Lumatone that you could then convert into another format such as MPE. Just normal notes and channels. Whether you even need to use more than one channel likely depends on other details of your mapping, eg whether each physical button is mapped to a completely unique note, as opposed to being repeated in strategic locations.
No problem, just keep in mind that I relied on their most obvious videos etc for that info, along with release notes for firmware and editor, so there is always a chance I missed something that it does have built in these days.
The smaller Striso Board appears to combine both. It uses a similar isomorphic layout (which is perfect for various kinds of microtonal tunings), but the performance data is sent as MPE MIDI over USB. It has three parameters of expression (up/down, left/right, forward/backward) + note on velocity, I think.
I don’t own one but it came to mind reading this discussion.
Lumatone, as a controller, does not have a center neutral expression parameter that could be used to wiggle around a center for pitch bend. It does however have polyphonic aftertouch. Most performances on the instrument are a bit more “pianistic” in that they work with stable pitch centers (as opposed to adding expressive vibrato like with the Osmose).
Here is an exhaustive resource concerning plugins supporting microtonality:
About half a year ago I was deliberating between going down the MPE (in my case: Osmose) route or exploring microtonality (likely with a Lumatone). I ended up choosing Osmose. But who knows, I might give it a shot if I can afford one. The music coming out of Lumatone has been quite innovative in my opinion. Look up Zhea Erose.
