.KEYWORD music
.FLYINGHEAD THE ULTIMATE GUIDE
.TITLE The musical PalmPilot computer
.DEPT
.SUMMARY Amazing as it may seem, the Palm device is quite musical — and a friend to musicians, composers, and other musically inclined individuals. Hiding behind the mild-mannered persona of contributing editor David Pogue lurks the secret identity of an accomplished composer and conductor. Blending his two worlds (that of the computer and of music), David introduces us to music on the PalmPilot. And, surprisingly, there are some wonderful solutions, including a songwriter’s helper, an electronic metronome, a tool for determining pitch, some nice melody makers, and even a tool for budding guitar players. If you’re musically inclined, this is the ultimate article for you.
.AUTHOR David Pogue
The hilarious thing about the PalmPilot’s crazy, out-of-control success is that it’s happening despite every plan laid by Palm Computing. The motto in their corporate hallways in Mountain View, California must be: "Less turns out to be more. Way, way more."
.H1 Let me explain
In the beginning, PalmPilot inventor Jeff Hawkins couldn’t find a manufacturer for his little gadget. Nobody would touch it because it did too little. It didn’t record your voice, it didn’t accept PC cards, it didn’t run Excel.
But Hawkins persisted. He’d seen the Newton flop, the Zoomer bomb, and the Wizards and Bosses tank. He knew the reason, too: those machines did too much. The designers overloaded their puny pocket-size arteries with too much software cholesterol. Hawkins wanted something simple, streamlined, focused.
Those qualities got the PalmPilot halfway into the halls of greatness. What shot it onto the pedestal, though, was exactly the opposite of Hawkin’s original conception: the add-ons. These gadgets, extensions, and thousands upon thousands of programs take the PalmPilot beyond its designers’ original plans. The PalmPilot’s ability to be harnessed to almost any mobile task is a tribute not to its design simplicity, but its design openness (and 3Com/Palm’s willingness to support almost any add-on effort).
For example, consider music. Yes, music. You might find it peculiar to hear music mentioned in conjunction with a device that can’t record sound, can’t play chords, and has a screen 160 dots square. But believe it or not, musicians around the world are tuning the PalmPilot to their will. Let us count the ways.
.H1 A little light MIDI music
You might think that the PalmPilot’s chirpy little speaker would nip this palmtop’s musical future in the bud. Actually, though, the music software for the PalmPilot excels at many musical tasks. And quit making fun of the PalmPilot’s little piezo speaker. As of the Palm III, the PalmPilot has a much stronger and more flexible music architecture, including a louder speaker and the ability to play standard MIDI files.
For the computer musicians who just splurted their Sprites: you read that right. The PalmPilot can play back standard (one-track, format 0) MIDI files, which are like text files for music. Such files, distributed by the thousands on the Internet, are tiny, but contain the complete computer instructions for playing prepared melodies.
So far, the only program that can play MIDI files is the Palm III’s own Date Book program those seven built-in alarm sounds are actually little MIDI files. The world awaits some enterprising road coder to write a program that can harness this new built-in technology. (Do it, and I’ll send you a free copy of "PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide." How’s that for incentive, programmers of the world?)
.H1 PocketSynth for songwriters
Fortunately, not all music software is nonexistent at this moment. As I mentioned in last month’s column, PocketSynth, for example, is a terrific little songwriter’s tool that lets you record and play back single-line melodies. You specify the pitch by tapping piano keys and the rhythm by choosing from a row of note values (quarter note, half note, dot, etc.). The program, shown in Figure A, uses its own textual notation for recording your melody: C22, for example, means to play the note C in the second octave for a quarter note but all of this is generated automatically. It’s useful to understand the notation, though, in case you want to compose a longer masterpiece by simply writing into, say, the Memo Pad.
.FIG A PocketSynth is the perfect musician’s friend during airport layovers.
Don’t have the patience to scrawl down your own little melodies? Then visit the Pilot Entertainment Zone at http://www.fidalgo.net/~ram/index.html for plenty of ready-to-play PocketSynth documents. They come as Doc files; you’re supposed to copy the textual music information out of the Doc file, switch to PocketSynth, and paste it into the Compose area.
What earned PocketSynth a place in my Palm III’s precious memory, however, is a crucial little side feature that any conductor or instrumentalist will wind up using constantly: the Metronome. It turns the PalmPilot into a beeping, flashing electronic metronome. It can even accent the downbeat of each measure, no matter what the meter, and you can turn off the sound if you want. As any musician can tell you, electronic metronomes not nearly as versatile cost about $50 at the local music shop.
If you repeatedly tap the plastic Scroll Up button at the bottom of the PalmPilot while using PocketSynth’s metronome mode, an amazing thing happens: the program actually calculates your tempo, displaying the numerical This feature alone adds another $50 to the cost of standalone electronic metronomes.
.H1 Metronome and Tuning Fork
Metronome, shown with Tuning Fork in Figure B, is similar to PocketSynth’s Metronome feature, but has two bonuses: a big, easy-to-use, idiotproof interface (including a scroll bar to adjust the tempo), and a readout of the musical marking (such as Allegro or Andante) that corresponds to the current tempo setting. Drag the scroll bar all the way to the bottom, you learn that you’re playing Mucha too slow-issimo! Metronome lets you turn on the visual flashing and the audio beeping simultaneously, but lacks PocketSynth’s accented downbeat, selectable beep pitch, and auto-tempo calculator. Also install Tuning Fork, which plays the standard tuning pitch A-440 (or A-442, or whatever your orchestra settles on) at your command, and you’ve avoided buying yet another piece of music-store electronics.
.FIG B Metronome (right) and Tuning Fork (left) replace mucho $$ in music-store electronics.
.H1 PalmPiano
PalmPiano, shown in Figure C, is similar, featuring an attractive four-octave piano keyboard and easy-to-use Record, Stop, and Play commands. You can actually record your own little melodies by tapping them out on the piano keyboard. Unfortunately, the program remembers only the pitches you play, not the rhythms. You can record as slowly as you like, but everything plays back at a standard speed, without regard to the timings you used (every note gets the same rhythmic value). If the next version records note rhythms as well as pitches, PalmPiano will be a knockout.
.FIG C PalmPiano records live performances, sort of.
.H1 EbonyIvory
If you’re trying to train yourself to be a better musician, consider EbonyIvory. You tap on the piano keyboard to hear a note and see it represented on the musical staff, which is perfectly suited for ear training. As you sit in the airport waiting for your layover to end, drill yourself; listen to the note and see if you can identify it. Learn the relationships between the way notes sound, the key on the piano that produces them, and the way they look when notated on sheet music.
.H1 FretBoard
FretBoard is an indispensable program for guitarists, displaying the correct fingerings for any note, scale, or chord. Actually, any musician can benefit from FretBoard; just being able to listen to the cleanly played chords and scales is great ear-training practice. A polished piece of work for working musicians.
.H1 The coda
Sure, the PalmPilot can play only one note at a time. Bach would have needed four PalmPilots to compose a fugue. And at the moment, the authors of music software for the PalmPilot are rushing to fill the most urgent niches first: tuning, metronome, melody-playing, and training.
But give them time. If I know anything about the world’s PalmPilot programmers, it won’t be long before we see racks of rock-concert MIDI equipment hooked up to a humble PalmPilot at the edge of the stage.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Visit the Pilot Entertainment Zone at http://www.fidalgo.net/~ram/index.html.
PocketSynth is available at http://www.echeng.com/Pilot/index.html.
Responsive Metronome is available at http://www.ResponsiveSoftware.com/metronome/index.shtml.
Tuning Fork is available at http://www.arcosoft.com/tunefork.htm.
PalmPiano is available at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~unitex/tjhome.htm.
EbonyIvory is available at http://www.arcosoft.com/ebony.htm.
FretBoard is available at http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~davmac/pilot.htm.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO David Pogue (at http://www.davidpogue.com) is the author of the #1 bestselling PalmPilot book, "PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide."
.DISCUSS http://www.component-net.com/webx?13@@.ee6c1ed
