ROLL OVER SPECTRUM

Alright, your Sinclair Spectrum is not noted to be a very good musician - how would you sound with a tiny piezo ceramic mouthpiece - but it has got an excellent memory for tunes and a finger dexterity second to none. So why not tap in on these resources and extend your musical repertoire with the speccy...

PROGRAM: MUSIC TYPEWRITER
Producer: Romantic Robot
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: B. Mikolasek & V. Meier
Address: Romantic Robot, 113 Melrose Avenue, London NW2 4LX

Converting a personal computer into a practical synthesizer usually requires a large amount of hardware - from musical keyboards to countless sound generators and filters. ROMANTIC ROBOT avoids this problem by converting the Spectrum into a music typewriter. The result is a respectable storage and retrieve type melody maker, not a realtime instrument. MUSIC TYPEWRITER stores up to 16 different music pieces within 254 bars, which can be edited and played with varying rhythm and tempo.

THE INSTRUMENTS

MUSIC TYPEWRITER comes complete with a manual and a keyboard overlay in a library box. The program lets you set paper and ink colours and then presents itself with the main menu. MUSIC TYPEWRITER is organised in three program pages. For each page a help menu may be called up for on screen instructions.

Page 0 contains the main menu, which also gives access to the other pages.

Page 1 provides a selection of the key and time signatures, tempo, clef and tail display of the music to be written.

Page 2 contains the catalogue of existing music pieces and provides the controls for creating, deleting, saving and loading of other music hors d'oevres. Throughout the program, SPACE moves the selecting cursor, ENTER executes the selected command or value, Q quits any operation and returns you to the main menu and BREAK reinitialises the program to the original colour selection.

The first excursion should lead to page 2, where the catalogue of existing music pieces will be displayed with their index number, name, number of bars and how many bars are still available. The piece to be written, edited or played is selected with NEW (for a new piece) or OLD (for an existing piece). Q brings back the main menu.

The second excursion should lead to page 1, where all the key and time parameters will have to be set up for the piece to be written, unless one operates with the default values. All the major keys are available at the touch of their key. Existing music pieces will be transposed taking care of all sharps, flats etc. Any time signature may be selected from 2/4 to 8/4 or 2/8 to 15/8. Tempo can be set anywhere between 23 and 255 of the metronome scale. Treble and bass clefs and tail direction are selected for the correct notation. Pressing Q returns you to the main menu where write mode may be selected. The music is written directly on the Spectrum keyboard. The overlay converts the Spectrum into a musical keyboard with the 3rd row from the top as white keys. The black keys, which can either be sharps or flats depending on notation can be accessed either on the 2nd row from the top (sharps) or the 4th row from the top (flats). There is just over 1 octave available at any time, but the whole range can be shifted an octave lower with caps shift & 2 or an octave higher with symbol shift & 2. The shift can be cancelled by pressing caps or symbol shift & 3. There are two clefs, the bass clef using the lower and the treble clef the upper part of the full 6 octave range. The basic note values are selected on the top row and range from a semibreve to a semiquaver (additional signs such as staccato, tenuto, dotted notes, triplets can also be selected) and apply until a new value is selected. The selected value is displayed in the top left corner of the screen. Pressing any of the music keys or PAUSE will play the note and display it simultaneously in the bar following the last entered note. Caps shift & 0 deletes the notes from right to left starting with the last written note. STEP steps you through existing notes from left to right without altering them. The program takes care of the bar tines and end line. Upon completion of the music piece the write mode is left by pressing ENTER upon completion of the last bar.

The tune may now be played by selecting PLAY from main menu, and the music parameters may be changed and experimented with. REPEAT repeats a piece N times. The range is from 1 to 255 with 255 being an endless loop.

If only certain bars of a music piece need to be altered EDIT will enable you to step through and change notes in a bar number N and onwards.

CRITICISM

MUSIC TYPEWRITER is an extremely user friendly program, which lets you get started within minutes. As the music has to be written in real notation, it is not suited for musicians who play by ear. You cannot play a melody with varying note values just by modulating the keys, so creating a rhythmical sequence will have to be worked out in the mind. MUSIC TYPEWRITER has tremendous potential as an educational program for young kids who have to come to grips with writing or reading a musical piece and have to team the scales. Disappointingly there is only one 'instrument' available. It would have been nice to have a range of instruments to choose from. After all, it's the one thing you expect from an electronic instrument. This together with the limitation of one voice only limits the pleasure of using MUSIC TYPEWRITER for anything more serious. One other drawback is the way in which the notes are displayed in playback and write/edit mode. The notes appear simultaneously when they are played or entered, but there is no forward vision. It is impossible to read (or learn to read) the notes on playback, as the preceding notes are invisible. It would have been far better to indicate the current play position by a change of ink colour using a less solid colour for the notes still to be played. The same goes for editing or writing an old piece, where you would li ke to do alterations by stepping with SPACE to copy the existing notes and to overwrite a certain section with new notes. As you are not aware of the next note you end up pressing STEP (SPACE) followed by DEL. (CAP SHIFT & 0) because of the blindness.

There is however full facility of making hard copies of your master pieces with a print command in the WRITE/EDIT mode for the current bar and in the main menu for an entire music piece. The music piece can be saved and loaded from tape by accessing page 2.

The keyboard overlay solves the problem of not having a dedicated musical keyboard and all the major commands are annotated for instant accessibility. There are a string of error reports which warn you of impending dangers and together with the HELP pages this makes for a very user friendly program.

Apart from any serious educational application MUSIC TYPEWRITER is an ideal pastime for any lingering musician. You can write the most masochist tune and see how the computer copes without any hiccups...

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 TYPEWRITER
Romantic Robot
77 Dyne Road, London NW6
01 625 9463
£9.95

Music Typewriter is a very impressive and well thought out package which assumes a level of musical knowledge before you start - and the booklet that comes with the program points out that no attempt is made to explain musical theory in the manual or in the program.

The graphical representation of notes and staves is quite brilliant, putting to shame the displays generated not only by the other Spectrum programs we've taken a look at but bettering the offerings of most expensive professional music systems. A joy to look at indeed.

Musically it is the most accurate of the Spectrum software allowing the use of bass and treble clefs and it's the only program to allow staccato and legato phrasing - music can be written exactly how a musician would write it out to be played expressively.

Music Typewriter comes with a keyboard overlay which renders input both user and musician friendly. The program allows hard copy to be generated as well as providing a transposition facility, with all incidentals being adjusted automatically. Up to sixteen tunes can be stored in memory, which has a cataloguing facility and tunes may be repeated a discrete number of times or endlessly. Up to 254 bars of music may be stored at any one time.

Working from a three screen menu the program is well documented and has a well ordered editing and cataloguing facility. Interestingly, Romantic Robot can supply a version of the software to drive a sound generation chip or even a MIDI interface (More about them next issue). Sadly there isn't a real time sequencing facility as offered by Spectune, and a little niggle is caused by the continental notation used for the note 'B' which appears as 'H', which might just confuse a few people.

Overall a very respectable program, visually attractive which is simple to use and is bound to appeal to any musician. For a musical illiterate background reading would be vital - as the manual suggests - and the software would provide a useful visual illustration of the theoretical concepts.

This package contains a very fast and easy-to-use non-real time sequencer that can process up to 16 tunes in memory. The writing and editing facilities are slightly easier to use than on Spectune, but then they're also musically more precise. You're even able to use complex timings like triplets and staccato notes with this package.

But the exceptional part has got to be the notation - it has to be seen to be believed! The way Music Typewriter prints up musical notation on-screen puts many expensive professional computer music systems to shame. The notes are tied together when necessary and, when in play mode, the music's printed out as the piece is played. The accuracy, even at fast speeds, is astonishingly good.

The program contains three pages of menu: Page 0 provides facilities to play, repeat, write, edit, and print; Page 1 changes key signatures, time signatures and tempo: and Page 2 catalogues the tunes with their respective titles and length.

The supplied manual comes complete with a keyboard overlay - which does help when you're playing the Spectrum as a musical keyboard. It would have been nice to see a demonstration program (like the one in Spectune), but you pays your money and you takes your choice. For me, though, the advanced musical notation definitely gives this one the edge.

TITLE: Music Typewriter
SUPPLIER: Romantic Robot
PRICE: £9.95

This was by far the best of the Spectrum packages we looked at. The graphics, though a little dull, are large and clear, the menu-driven pages are easy to use and everything is very fast. Music notation is strictly adhered to, even to using triplets and specifying staccato.

The only problem we found with this very professional-looking package is the use of the keyboard. Rather than moving a note on a stave, the pitch is decided by the key you press. To facilitate this, Romantic Robot kindly include a key overlay which is useless to anybody with a replacement keyboard, or a Spectrum Plus.

STAVE NOTATION: Yes, fully
ENTER MUSIC: Yes
PLAY MUSIC: No
SAVE TO TAPE: Yes
PRINTER: Yes - wide range of interfaces and printers.
TEMPO CHANGE: Yes
KEY SIGNATURE: Yes
TIME SIGNATURE: Yes
TRANSPOSE: Yes
STORAGE: 254 bars (with up to 16 different melodies, each with its own name)
48K/16K: 48K

Romantic Robot
£9.95
113 Melrose Ave
London NW2

Excellent, although S/time entry only. Graphics and ease of use make this program worth the high price. Printout option provided and accurate timing on replay. Top marks!

ZX WAXES MUSICAL WITH A SURVEY OF SOFTWARE PACKAGES FOR THE SPECTRUM.

Romantic Robot
£7.95
(With Supplement £9.95)

This is my all time favourite music program for the ordinary Spectrum. It is probably the most complex to use yet has the easiest system of note entry that I have seen. This company were using icons before icons were the "in" system! A keyboard overlay for the rubber key Spectrum overlay and user manual, eight, small print pages of concise and well written intructions are included. Constant access to three program pages, each with their own help options, is provided while the program is operating. All the control options and variations on tempo and key signatures are included plus notes which range over six octaves.

On screen graphics are superb! Of course the end result is still monophonic and lacks expression giving tunes the bland Spectrum music sound. However if was to Romantic Robot that Micro Musical came when they wanted software written for their Midi Keyboard and interface - but that's another story... Since the early version, which I had, they have produced an even more sophisticated program with the supplement program. This provides a superb printout via a dot matrix machine through a variety of interfaces. Most Epson style printers operate well, except my CP80! which loses a couple of notes at the end. A conversion program for M/drive is also provided. My biggest moan about this, and many similar programs is that you could not use the end product in your own programs and games. The extra supplement provides a program to take files created by the typewriter program and convert them to stand alone machine code music. (i.e. tunes play without the main program to play them).

After over a year this is still the best program around in my opinion. I can't wait to see what they produce for the 128.

A FIRST CLASS ROMP

Theo Wood finds that educational software is a boon to teachers.

One feature which stands out when you look back on 1985 is the increasing sophistication of software in the learning field.

While previous years saw a mass of new software the quality was not necessarily good. There was a feeling that publishers were keen to jump on the bandwagon and produce software quickly for a perceived, rather than an actual, market.

Some of those programs were distinctly dull, but 1985 saw an increase in the games element and the fun/educational borderline became blurred.

PRESCHOOL LEARNING

For the pre-school and infant age group Romper Room from Beyond is another attempt at using the Spectrum for initial alphabet teaching. Romper Room is much more lively than previous programs of this type. It features a character called Max who illustrates each letter with an action. The screen picture above is one example.

On the first game, Watch the Letters, both capital and small letters are shown together with a small sentence to be read by the parent. Max then sets the word, such as dancing for D. That is much more fun than a static graphic of an object.

The three other games in the package, Press a Letter, Find a Letter, and Letter Quiz work from that basis. Letter Quiz is the hardest of the games, where the player has to observe Max's action, determine the initial letter, and then press the letter on the keyboard.

Education publisher Macmillan has produced games which follow on from the kind of skills learnt in Romper Room.

Tops and Tails and Castles and Clowns are designed with the help of Betty Root, who is the 1985 President of the United Kingdom Reading Association. Those games are involved with the recognition of initial sounds and Tops and Tails introduces sound blends. Both feature games and, interestingly, two people can play. That is really useful when you have two children squabbling over who should play with the computer.

Mr T Meets His Match by Good Housekeeping, deals with memory skills. The players have to pick out pairs of animals as they turn over cards on the screen. The one-player option allows Mr T to be a forgetful or clever computer opponent. At a higher level the animals on the cards change to geometric shapes.

The other game, Switcheroo, provides food for thought as the task is to change one animal into another in four moves. That can be done by changing the size, colour, or animal. Mr T Meets His Match is an interesting package which deals with non-verbal skills using entertaining graphics.

Paddington's Garden Game is a gentle arcade frolic in which Paddington has to go around the garden to find a pot of marmalade, catching butterflies as he goes. The butterflies are released at the end of the game.

Joystick control ensures easy use. The game is innocent enough for the younger age group for which it is designed. Paddington fans should enjoy it, while practising hand/eye coordination.

SIMPLE ARITHMETIC

While today's educational thinking encourages calculators for yesterday's burdensome tasks of long division and multiplication, elementary numeracy cannot be ignored. Several programs work on that problem and are so designed as to deal with varying skill levels from five to 11.

Mirrorsoft's Ancient Quests pack age has a game called The Count which provides practice of simple counting to more complicated sums such as division and multiplication. Moving around the castle you must solve the problems posed before reaching the library where the Count can be overcome.

The other game, King Tut's Treasure includes arcade action. You must move Professor Diggins around the screens, avoid the hazards and dig for the matching shapes, match a fraction with a decimal or fraction with a name.

Psion and ASK collaborated on two of the year's best programs which deal with numbers. Estimator Racer is another arcade classic in which you have to race around a track as fast as possible. The faster you go the more frequently you have to answer questions. The speed and level can be selected and depend on the type of car and player's control.

Estimator Racer is different from other similar programs in that it is not the correct answer which is needed but the one nearest to the answer. That skill is useful when using a calculator, and encourages quick thinking without the need for complete accuracy.

Number Painter is another program with the same pedigree. This time the aim is to reach the target number by painting out other numbers - such as +2, +3 - until the target is reached. Based on a platform and ladders game, and operating at a number of different skill levels, Number Painter is great fun and has enough action to appeal to players who are hooked on games.

ADVENTURES

Adventure games have proved popular and the format is selling well in adventure books with multiple choice options. Taking an active role in the development of the plot, young readers are encouraged to improve their reading skills.

Mirrorsoft's Phineas Frogg must be considered a classic of its type for eight to 10 year olds. A story book is provided to fill in the plot background before you start the game, and a multiple choice of action is shown on each screen. There are also several arcade games which have to be played to solve the mystery, which is to save the scientist Mole from the Secret Lair of the Terrible Hamsters - SLOTH for short.

Jack in Magiciand could be played by the same age group, or as with Phineas, with younger non-readers as an alternative to reading a story. Based on the old tale it too has options. As a text-only adventure it lacks some of the interest of Phineas, but that is compensated by using a more descriptive text.

SIMULATIONS

Simulations are one way of introducing a subject and practising skills. Weathermaster by Sinclair/Macmillan is one of my favourites. Using it you can play at being a weather forecaster.

Onscreen you see a picture of the British isles and the frontal systems moving over the chart. The aim of the game is to provide a correct forecast. That must be done for each region until the whole country has been covered. If you can do that you can become a weathermaster - no mean feat.

Oilstrike is another in the Science Horizons series from Sinclair/Macmillan. It is a simulation similar to Weathermaster but this time you have to survey and drill for oil. The secret is to find suitable oil-bearing strata before drilling, otherwise costs mount turning the operation into what could prove to be a fruitless exercise.

The success of sports simulations in the software charts proves their popularity. Two sports simulations which require more skill than usual are Yacht Race and Run For Gold, both from Hill MacGibbon.

Yacht Race is an introduction to the art of sailing and comes with a printed chart of the different courses. There are six levels of difficulty which allow the novice to learn by coping with steering the dinghy before moving on to trimming the sails and setting the balance.

Run For Gold similarly requires a learning curve to fully master the pace and steering of your two chosen runners. Setting the pace too high for your runners will quickly tire them out. The object of the game is to increase your fitness level in local meets, before moving on to reach Olympic standard.

The Spectrum is not noted for its musical capability but one program stands out which uses what little there is to the full. Music Typewriter, from Romantic Robot, enables you to print out a score on to a wide selection of printers and interfaces.

The product is a real aid to budding composers who are working with a musical instrument. You can ENTER the notes with the help of the keyboard overlay which is provided, and edit the tune bar by bar.

A substantial section dealing with setting key changes, rhythm or tempo, as well as right or left-hand play options, means that the package can cover a wide variety of musical styles. You cannot use chords, but that is a failing of the hardware.

MORE LOGO LOGIC

Sinclair's own version of Logo was a critical success in 1984 and provided Spectrum owners with the chance to experiment with a full implementation of the language. Two Logo lookalikes were released in 1985 which offer Logo facilities of Logo at a reduced price.

Spectrum Logo Graphics from Sigma deals purely with turtle graphics. Using a keyboard overlay the main commands can be ENTERed with single key stroke. Spacing between commands is added automatically. That may be of some help to younger children but the entry of commands will not deter most children. The big drawback with the program is, however, that routines cannot be SAVEd.

The second Logo program was Picture Logic, from Addison Wesley. The program is a reworking of Heather Govier and Malcolm Neave's earlier program Logo Challenge.

Picture Logic adopts the structured approach to turtle-type graphics. The book accompanying the software takes you through the first stages and beyond by a series of exercises, called challenges, with many hints and tips to help beginners. In neither of the two programs is there any list processing facility which can be found in the full Sinclair version. If, however, you want turtle graphics and want a structural approach Picture Logic is the best buy.

One package which is easy to use and provides access to the Spectrum's graphics capability is New Generation's Light Magic. The program allows you to draw onscreen, change brush size and generally play around with colour and pattern without any programming skills. A program such as that can give some insight into how a graphic system works as well as being instantly usable.

BOOKWARE

For 11 to 16 year olds the Century Communications book Maths Tutor for the Spectrum is to be recommended. It is not a revision package but a self-contained maths course in book form with a tape for a few pounds extra.

A maths course could well be very difficult to follow but author Robert Carter has brought a masterly use of language into play which ensures that the whole subject does not become too dry. The explanations in the book are oustandingly clear and simple, and use of the programs in the book reinforces understanding of the mathematical concepts required up to O Level.

Revision programs are the mainstay of the program lists for secondary school age. The best of those on the science side are the Pan/Hill MacGibbon packages, called Pan Course Tutors. They cover all the usual science subjects and come with a text book.

There are diagnostic tests at the beginning of the programs which help students to identify weak spots in their study course.

The student is then directed to a suitable module. The modules make extensive use of screen windows, with one for the explanation, one for a question and a third for hints.

Penguin has released more titles in its study range, which mostly cover English Literature. Those operate on database techniques which allow you to browse through and follow characters in a novel or play. As the study of English Literature is largely interpretive, and the space for text is extremely limited, it would seem that those and other, similar, packages offer little real advantage over revision notebooks.

WORLDLY WISE

A program for older students which does not concern revision is Worldwise, a study of nuclear weapons. It operates as a database as well as providing a basis for playing negotiation simulations. It is meant as a factual program and not, in itself, an opinion former.

The Richardson institute for Conflict and Peace Research, at Lancaster University, operates an update system for members of the user group WUG - Worldwise Users Group, membership £2.00. Extra copies and microdrive versions can be obtained through the group at a special price.

Programs such as Worldwise can be used to provide the basis for intelligent discussion in an area which is renowned for bias and emotion, frequently unsupported by hard facts.

All in all, 1985 has been a good year for educational software. As it becomes less easy to rely on simple rule and drill exercises, producers of software are showing imagination and wit in their programs. In doing so the packages are becoming more attractive to use and more fun to play.