Where's the Beat? Tools For Dynamic Tempo Calculations

Proceedings of the 2007 International Computer Music Conference, Copenhagen

"Timegrid" is a set of methods and tools geared towards working with polyphonic tempo structures. Common tempo operations such as linear and exponential accelerandi and more uncommon ones such as arbitrarily complex functions are used, which are converted to simple time and tempo pairs. Aimed at the composer these processes produce a variety of files useful for audition, graphical scoring and direct use in algorithmic composition. The methods and tools described here can be used to solve a variety of problems. As an additional example a method for the generation of random numbers from an arbitrary distribution is shown. "Timegrid" is implemented as an external and an application in MaxMSP and made publicly available together with its source code.