MUSIC MICRO, PLEASE

Just to prove that Tech Niche isn't all soulless stuff about insensitive peripherals, JON BATES and GRAEME KIDD throw away their joysticks and take up the baton to conduct a round-up of sensitively musical software.

No matter how wonderful you believe your Spectrum to be, in arguments with Commodore, BBC or even Amstrad owners, you will have to concede that they have the edge when it comes to sound. The Amstrad, for instance, has three channels, which allows you to create a stereo sound and a white noise generator. Your 'umble Speccy doesn't have a chip dedicated to sound generation and gets by when it comes to making sound by switching the 'speaker' on and off, more rapidly for higher notes, less rapidly for the lower ones.

The BASIC Manual is a bit naughty when it tells you: '...because there is only one loudspeaker in the computer you can only play one note at a time, so you are restricted to unharmonised tunes.'

'Loudspeaker' it ain't, but the only reason why you can't play more than one note at a time is because there's only one channel which can be switched on and off to generate noise. Other computers, which have dedicated sound chips, let you use several channels and that allows more complicated, harmonised tunes to be put together. Like the manual says, if you want anything more than simple unharmonised tunes on the Spectrum 'you must sing it yourself.' As you might expect, there's quite a lot of specialised hardware and software available which extends the capabilities of the Spectrum, moving it towards (and maybe even past) the level of musical competence achieved by other machines. We'll be taking a look at these bolt-on musical goodies in future Niches; for the present we've confined ourselves to a close examination of the software which runs on the basic Spectrum.

We found six programs which, to a greater or lesser extent, take the pain out of programming tunes in the 'BEEP 1,0: BEEP 5,3:' format, and three musical education packages which go part of the way to helping the musically illiterate get to grips with the subject. Rather than plunge in at the deep end on our own, we persuaded a real live musician - Jon Bates - to help evaluate the software.

A professional keyboard player, author of a book on synthesisers and keyboard teacher, Jon invented a new rating for the purposes of these reviews - MUSICALITY. We've taken account of Graphics, Educational Value and User-friendliness, but Musicality is, in effect, a musician-friendliness rating and depends on the musical accuracy of the software. Before awarding the Musicality rating for each program, Jon asked himself the question, 'is it in accordance with the basic rules of how music is written and sounds?' 0/10 for Musicality would make a musician scream, he told us!

The other half of the dynamic reviewing duo, Mr Kidd, claims to know a bit about computers but is a self-confessed music illiterate. Nuff said about him.

PLAY, TYPE AND TRANSPOSE
Hilton Computer Services
14 Avalon Rd, Orpington
£9.00

This program is in a different league to all the others reviewed in this column. It is not a LOAD AND RUN FUN program, but a musical utility which has limited graphical presentation, lengthy and complicated documentation and is designed to be used by someone who has a fair knowledge of both music and programming.

Notes are written to the 'play' program using BEEP statements, but putting in abbreviations for the standard names of musical notes rather than timings. A fair bit of pen and paper work is required before you start composing, and in many respects the program is a half way house for programmers who can't be bothered to work out the BEEP section of their Spectrum Manual.

The type and transpose program allows you to type notes onto bass and treble staves and then transpose from one page to another. The music typewriter controls are more complicated than the average Chinese typewriter and the end result is less than graphically stunning although the transposition facility could be useful enough to a non-musician to justify the effort of getting there!

All in all a very complicated package, with a large explanatory manual which is less than straightforward. It could be worth the mental anguish necessary to get to grips with the programs but there's very little offered in the way of musical explanation and there's no way someone could work out how to input a piece of music without prior musical knowledge. The program is in a fairly primitive state, and has obviously been written by a dedicated hobbyist, well wrapped up the subject material. An oddity which could be easy to dismiss out of hand; it's hard to work out quite who this package would appeal to. When it was first written several years ago it would have been 'state of the art', but the art has advanced by leaps since, and left it far behind.

This software package comes complete with a seven-page manual, which tells you that the Play program plays tunes entered as a series of BEEP and PAUSE Basic statements. The question is, why was the program written at all?

Having loaded the cassette, you're asked how many sharps and flats are required; the problem here is that your key signature will contain either sharps or flats, but not both! After you've waded through a couple of screens giving you information on the pitch card and how to cope with metronome markings, you're in for a real thrill. The program breaks out and asks you to type your tune in Basic. What all this means is that after you've shelled out your hard-earned money for this package, you're told to type in the equivalent of what appears in chapter 19 of your Spectrum manual. Out of interest, I tried writing a tune and altering the musical parameters, but it made not the slightest difference.

The other program in this package is Music Typing and Transposing which is much the same as Play - tedious and boring.

TITLE: Play, Type and Transpose
SUPPLIER: Hilton Computer Services
PRICE: Not available

The first of two programs produces a pitch card based on the key signature you enter. In other words, it tells you what values to use for each note in BEEP statements. You then have to type in the BEEP and PAUSE statements in BASIC. This causes the pitch card to disappear, so they suggest that you write the tune data on paper first - and we thought that the computer was supposed to replace the necessity of using paper! Typing in the tune is made slightly easier with the use of predefined variables for note lengths (ie crotchets, etc.).

The second program allows you to enter and transpose music onto a musical stave. The method of doing this is slow and tedious, making this part almost as slow and tedious as the first program. The only words that come to mind for the overall package is "rip off".

STAVE NOTATION: Yes, but not fully
ENTER MUSIC: Yes
PLAY MUSIC: No
SAVE TO TAPE: Yes
PRINTER: Yes
TEMPO CHANGE: Yes
KEY SIGNATURE: Yes
TIME SIGNATURE: Yes
TRANSPOSE: Yes
STORAGE: 70 notes in each of 30 prog lines.
48K/16K: 48K

£4.95
Hilton Computer Services
14 Avalon Rd
Orpington
Kent BR6 9AX

A waste of money.