x         KUL0S     

     U N I V T R A N

       USER'S MANUAL





UNIVTRAN is a universal transliterator. Translitteration is like
translation, except when working on human languages it does not consider
differences in word order, idiom, grammar, etc., but just substitutes
word by word one symbol for another. For translating music from one
code into another it is ideal. This package converts tunes generated
by THE TUNE EDITOR, which have been played in by ear on a "vanilla"
(no hardware add-ons) IBM or compatable, to SONGFILES which can be
submitted to the THE POLYPHONIC MUSIC PACKAGE (by Edwardd Grigassy)
as single voice tunes or combined as voices into one SONGFILE to be
submitted to THE POLYPHONIC MUSIC PACKAGE.





      HOW TO USE UNITRAN



1. familiarize yourself at least a little with THE TUNE EDITOR the
file HANDBOOK.DOC in its package is its manual. A minimal, but sufficient
familiarity can be aquired by reading the beginning of the manual.
The version called TIGER.BAS of TUNE EDITOR is supplied here.

2. Play a tune while TUNE EDITOR is in "RECORD" and perfect it using
the editing tools (tapping in the rhythm again, splicing, appending,
rounding off (clicking to grid) the rhythm, etc.

3. Make sure this tune has been placed into slot one (the "CHOOSE
ONE" menu display will say "SONG NUMBER 1" at the bottom of the screen.

4. Similarlly, you should store the tunes for the other voices in
the same piece in slots 2 and 3 (Grigassy's package should not be
given pieces with more than 3 voices). Since these tunes will be stored
in a "poke memory", by a machine-independent peek/poke server, this
information will only be in RAM and should be backed up every now
and then to a more secure place (disk) by pressing "s" from the "CHOOSE
ONE" menu and then typing the name of the backup file. Then say "RUN"
and go back into the editor. This editor must be run in GWBASIC, BASIC,
BASICA, SBASIC, or SBASICA, but not in QUICKBASIC.

5. When you have edited to your heart's content, it is time to do
the translitteration. At this stage you want to seperate the data
from the program of THE TUNE EDITOR. To do this, break out of the
program with "S" from the "CHOOSE ONE" menu.:

6. At the Ok prompt say:



   MERGE"KILLPROG"


                     1 
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7. At the return of the Ok prompt say:



      SAVE"DATA.BAS", A    .

8. Now it's time to generate an ASCII file containing the musical
score. This score can be sumbitted to UNIVTRAN directly or edited
first by the user. Since the score is saved as a BASIC  program you
can use the arrow keys to edit the listing in BASICA, or GWBASIC,
or use the editor of your choice. The ARGOB audible Braille editor
is supplied for Blind and Partially Sighted users.

Pressing "0" from the "CHOOSE ONE" menu of TUNE EDITOR would have
directed the score to the printer!, but you want to direct the score
to an ASCII file. To do this you need a version of TUNE EDITOR named
COWSOUND . It is recommended that you practice and develope your tunes
with TIGER and use COWSOUND only for saving the scores. This is because
COWSOUND  will also try to save to the file the "sounds" as well as
the score if you "PLAY" back the tune (with a "7" from the "CHOOSE
ONE" menu as opposed to a "2" from that menu). So anyway, to save
the score as a file which will be the object given to UNIVTRAN say:



       LOAD"COWSOUND"   .



9. At the return of the Ok prompt, say:



       MERGE"DATA"     .



10.  Then say:



       RUN   .



11.  Go into the program as if it were TIGER and find your way into
the "CHOOSE ONE"  menu for song 1.



12.  Fetch the tune from POKE memory into short-term memory by pressing
"2" at the "CHOOSE ONE" menu.



13. Once the tune has been displayed on the screen (as a line of
characters) and or played during the fetching, press E to return to
the "CHOOSE ONE" menu.

14. If you forgot the  "MERGE "DATA" " stage, the tune you got will
be whatever the previous user left in COWSOUND in slot 1, but if you
remembered to MERGE, your tune will be the one in place in slot 1.
. Now press "0" from the "CHOOSE ONE" menu, which will have re-appeared
when you pressed "E" after the tune was fetched. The pressing of "0"
will cause the score to be saved to a file whose name you chose when
entering COWSOUND at its 2nd prompt (or is it the first? (it's a matter
                     2 
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of semantics)). Make sure you use a name ending in ".bas".

15. Having saved the score to a file, the program will print a new
paragraph on the top of the screen, thus you know you are done. Just
press <CR> twice to get back to "CHOOSE ONE" then press "S" followed
by two <CR>'s. This will take you back to the Ok prompt, whereupon
you want to say "RUN" to get back into COWSOUND. Invent a name for
the tune in slot 2 and simmilarly save a score of the contents of
slot 2 to this file as you did with slot 1's tune.

16. Do the same for he tune in slot 3. .

17. Go back into DOS by thyping "SYSTEM" from the Ok prompt.

18. Type "UNIVTRAN" from the DOS prompt.

19. Answer the questions in the prompts resulting from the running
of UNIVTRAN. There are 3 of them:

a. the name of the file from slot 1, 2, or 3, with or without explicitly
typing its ".bas" extention.

b. a number equal to 1, 2, or 3 for the voice that this tune will
represent in the finished product, and

3. What octave you want the tune to use as its center of operations,
a number between 1 and 6.

When starting to save the score, COWSOUND will queery you for a "tempo"
parameter and a "transpose" parameter.

Just press <CR> when in doubt. Otherwise enter numbers. The tempo
number will change the speed of the tune, but still try to round off
the rhythm at a constant beat duration, so rounding up where rounding
down once occurred may sporadically happen. Pressing "N" from the
"CHOOSE ONE" menu in TIGER will implement this round off function,
but will avoid the added time and/or overhead by withholding any printing
and/or saving, or anything else except rounding (it is actually the
base 1/2 logs that get rounded). It is best to get that taken care
of in "TIGER" before coming into COWSOUND. The TRANSPOSE  parameter
will move the tune higher or lower as many half-steps (semitones)
as indicated by the number you type in. Negative numbers transpose
down, posative ones up. If transposing takes you out of range of TIGER's
vocabulary, then the program will crash, and you need to type "RUN"
to get back in, but type "CLOSE" first to close the file you were
trying to make. Then you can try again with a different TRANSPOSE
number.

20. Once you have completed 3 runs of UNIVTRAN you will have created
3 SONGFILES, each will have the name of the BAS file from which it
was derived, but with the ".BAS}" replaced by ".SNG". Go into the
file called COMBINE.BAS (use GWBASIC, BASICA, or the BASIC of your
choice, a compiled version is not supplied by me). Give it:

a. the name of the final file which will have several voices, including
".SNG" on the end of the name.

b. then names of each of the 3 (or less) ".SNG" files you just created,
                     3 
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and

c. the French word "FINI" (in caps) wich means "all done".

You will soon have a SONGFILE ready to submit to MAKEPLAY in the
POLYPHONIC MUSIC PACKAGE to hear the result. See Edward Grigassy's
instructions for details on how to subsequently play the song with
PLAYKB (how to affect speed control etc.). To edit the voices two
at a time, go into the fprogram "PARALLEL.BAS" and get an ascii file
which shows two voices lined up in parallel. Edit this file with the
editor of your choice, then separate the two voices and submit them
one at a time to UNIVTRAN.

To seperate them use the program named "MITOSIS.BAS". The leger line
for middle C can be left blank or filled in, or bits of both.

It is fine to run these applications in your interpreteter BASIC,
but UNIVTRAN should be run from the EXE file to get the most speed
out of it.

Keep in mind playing music with THE TUNE EDITOR and getting it just
right is much more of an art than a science or a craft and will take
time to practise and master. What TUNE EDITOR will offer you is almost
instant turn around between what you have produced as symbols, and
hearing the music depicted by those symbols, and then modifying the
symbols for improvement sake and hearing the results of your modification.







          A NOTE ON RESTS AND SPACERS





When you want a rest of a particular duration, duplicate a line (or
should I say collumn since the score is rotated 90 degrees clockwise)
which represents a note of the same duration as the desired rest.
Place this line where you want the rest to be, and just replace the
note (an "O" for a natural note or a "#" for a sharp note) with a
space or a "1" which will be part of a leger line. Leave the number
at the end of the line intact. It will be a number like 1/2, 1/16,
etc. to indicate note (or rest) duration. If you want to indicate
a spacer to line up simultaneous events so they occur in the same
collumn, do as you did for a rest to indicate a spacer, except this
time, delete the number, so the closing quote at the end of the line
is right against the "1" which represents the top leger line in the
treble cleft.

When using the TUNE EDITOR indicate rests just by pressing the space
bar. The duration will depend on how long you wait before playing
the next note, since the machine will be recording your rhythm.

          CLEANING UP AFTER YOURSELF


                     4 
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A number of temperary files are created during the running of UNIVTRAN.
These are left intact for your study and curiosity. However they represent
so much clutter and you may well want to erase them after a project
is done. To do this in one operation, run the program called DELETER.
The "directory to search?" prompt should be answered with the word
"GARBAGE". The file called "garbage" consists of a directory of your
temperary files. The exemption string, the string you type in at the
"spare all lines with this string in them?" prompt, should be a string
that won't appear in any line in this directory if you really wwant
to erase all of them. I use "DRAGON".



Good Luck, have fun!
