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.

MUSIC MAKER
Bellflower Software
Rosewood Avenue, Greenford, London
01 903 1816
£5.75

Music Maker comes with a fairly detailed inlay card which takes the reader on a whistle stop tour of musical notation and theory. It makes good sense to someone in the know but might be a little confusing to the novice. It must have been a difficult task to compress so much information into such a small space, and it's unfortunate that there's no additional help in the program itself, which is a bit complicated.

The input method, using cursor keys (which move rather rapidly when selecting) takes a bit of getting used to. The screen displays the bar you're working on, and while it plays each note as you add it - giving you the option to delete it immediately - there's no real editing facility. Notes can only be deleted from the end of an assembled tune, and if you find the third note in your fifty note composition is wrong, there's no option but to delete the last forty seven notes you input before you get to the mistake, and then lay them all back in again. It can get a bit tedious keying in a long tune, and if you're re-keying an old tune which you've just deleted by editing, the aggravation factor increases dramatically.

Musically the program is a bit limiting, in that there are only ten playback speeds to choose from, and it seemed impossible to tie notes together so that they can be sustained over a bar for instance. The program accepts up to 200 notes or events and allows tunes to be stored on cassette and printed out. In the main, a worthy piece of programming which scores plus points for printing a couple of tunes on the inlay for the user to try out.

This program comes neatly packaged with a helpful index card; the instructions have been well-written and are very easy to follow. Unlike some of the other packages in this review, the programmer obviously has some knowledge of music - which I do feel is important!

The screen has been quite well laid out; the only problem here being that it displays only one bar at a time while you're inputting notes. Staying with the process of writing your tune on-screen, the program won't allow you to delete more than one note back - and even then, it has to be in the same bar. This means that if you do make an error, you've got no choice but to start all over again. On playback, it first prints the notes on the screen in non-real time and then plays them back in real time.

Music Maker allows you to add to the existing melody and store it on to cassette for later use; if you possess a printer, you can also obtain a hard copy and alter the speed of the playback.

Overall, this program's pretty good - but it should have included a suitable editing facility.

Memory: 48K
Price: £5.75

None but the tone deaf and owners with additional hardware attached to their machines would be able to detect a high degree of musical quality in the high, piercing sounds emitted by the Spectrum. The proliferation of programs devoted to its musical functions is therefore puzzling.

Music Maker allows users to compose, play and edit tunes for the Spectrum but does so in very slow fashion. Key signature, speed, notes and their length all must be picked-out laboriously. Those who are not gifted musically could probably produce similar musical effects after spending an hour programming with the Spectrum manual to hand. Musical notation would not be produced in the latter case but programming techniques would be developed.

Although no knowledge of musical theory is necessary to use the program, the use of musical notation to show notes already chosen would probably deter those who cannot read music.

Music Maker is produced for the 48K Spectrum by Bellflower Software, 6 Rosewood Avenue, Greenford, Middlesex.

TITLE: Music Maker
SUPPLIER: Bellflower Software
PRICE: Not available

This program is very easy to use, but suffers from a lack of thought for the user. For instance, though ideal for entering music from a score, it would be extremely difficult to use this program for composing your own tunes. If you notice a mistake whilst playing the tune, there is no way to recover, other than deleting all the notes back to where the error occurred. The obvious method of avoiding this problem is to play the tune every couple of bars, but the program methodically prints all the notes to the screen before playing them at the proper tempo, making this approach extremely slow. This is a nicely produced program, but could be better.

STAVE NOTATION: Yes, but only treble clef
ENTER MUSIC: Yes
PLAY MUSIC: No
SAVE TO TAPE: Yes
PRINTER: Yes
TEMPO CHANGE: Yes
KEY SIGNATURE: Yes
TIME SIGNATURE: Yes
TRANSPOSE: No
STORAGE: ? (200 bars)
48K/16K: 48K

HOLMES INVESTIGATES

Paul Holmes inspects a number of new software packages for the ZX Spectrum.

Being somewhat musical myself, I loaded up this program hoping to find something to lighten up my life. After choosing my key and time signatures (from eleven major keys and twelve times), I eagerly entered my first tune. "Nice graphics", I thought. However, I found some aspects of the program a little limiting, eg no notes shorter than a quaver were allowed, and I was restricted to between middle C and the G an octave and a half above. Tied notes were also not catered for, which could prove inconvenient.

The documentation (which included three sample tunes), seemed a little educational in style, which may account for the above shortcomings. The feature that I found most annoying though, was the fact that I could only delete the most recently entered note, which I needed to do more than just once. One other odd point was that the program seemed to avoid putting accidentals on lines, instead much preferring the space immediately above or below, which looked a little messy.

So, pressing the 'p' key to play, I sat back to hear someone else's melody echo in my ears, only to be rudely awakened. Again, good graphics, but the tune! Every time the program drew a barline there was a very audible pause. Quavers were out of time too; the program could not draw them fast enough, and every time the program filled up a screen there was a pause of about two seconds while it cleared screen and redrew the three staves. Surely a little machine code could have been used here, or failing that (not everyone loves the Z80!) the music could have been printed first, and a pointer moved along in time. This fault, I am sorry to say, makes the program almost unusable, which is a pity considering the graphics and the need for such a program.

In conclusion, this package would not satisfy those who seriously want to make music.

£5.75
Bellflower Software
6 Rosewood Avenue
Greenford
Middlesex

Disappointing, not bad for an early attempt, but slow and limited.