MORE MUSICAL INTERLUDES

Producer: Melbourne House
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: Mark Alexander

After the success of Wham, The Music Box, Mark Alexander has vastly improved the sound capabilities, taking full advantage of the sound chip on board the 128. The original version for the 48K machine uses the Beep command split by a routine to create a duophonic effect and has some options for adding percussive noise. Note entry is achieved via the bottom two rows of keys which, in combination with an octave key, gives you a range of about five octaves per voice.

Note values are limited to quavers only, but you can join them together to form longer notes - rests are inserted from the ENTER key. As you enter notes on the second channel you automatically hear the first track along with it, which means that bum notes in a harmony are instantly recognised. Tempo is variable and editing is absurdly simply - just advance through the tune step by step till you hear the offending note, select the channel and overwrite. There is also a looping facility for each channel so that sequences can be set up or repeats of the whole piece can be arranged.

So how does the 128 version improve on this? Plenty, is the answer. The opening turn for the screen display is 'Peter Gunn' in a cleverly designed arrangement that shows off the three channels of sound plus percussion. Each channel can be set to produce a different sound by some rather clever software that allows you to design your own sound envelope. Note entry and editing is very much the same as in the 48K version and the display shows you where you are in the piece as the notes scroll past a fixed point.

Each channel has a window display showing you which sound envelope number it is using complete with a graph of that envelope. It also registers the note number counted from the beginning of the piece. A larger window flashes up the special effects or commands you have specified as they occur during the piece. The effects, assignable to each channel individually, are as follows:

a) altering the envelope volume which will help you to get joined notes sound smoother, getting rid of the rather annoying pulse present in the 48K version.

b) altering the individual levels of the channels so that a good sound balance is possible.

c) an additional looping facility.

d) the ability to make any channel slide up and down in pitch. This can produce very spectacular effects.

The display has a volume meter like a VU meter on a hi-fi. A piano keyboard running across the bottom of the screen shows you where your notes are being played or entered, with a different colour used on the display for each channel. The colour of the screen border can be altered to suit.

From the main menu, apart from the usual load and save options, there are help pages and sections dedicated to defining the sound envelopes. The latter are noise free and produce some pretty good sounds. The envelope editing cleverly uses a set of bar graphs that shape the sound via the arrow keys, each alteration being plotted in an adjoining window. It comes with eight preset sound envelopes so that you are not completely at sea. When transferred to the main display each sound graph is reproduced in miniature in the channel window.

There are also nine preset drum noises that can be varied far more than on the 48K version: a wider choice of frequencies and volumes is available via the envelope editing procedure. Any percussion effect has to be put onto one of the three channels but you can switch from percussion to notes within each channel, and with careful planning the loss of one channel for an instant is not noticeable.

Your homespun masterpieces can be saved to RAM disc as well as cassette. Like the 48K version it has a compiler which produces a machine code routine which lets you put tunes into programs of your own creation.

The accompanying documentation and instructions are all fairly accurate, although the key reference guide needs amending for the 128. For example the 'step back one note' command only worked when SYMBOL SHIFT was held down. CAPS LOCK and P independently allows you to step through the tune event by event (note by note as they occur). But it does list a 'get you started' tune for you to enter, as well as six pre-programmed tunes that put The Music Box through it's paces very successfully, even it some of the tunes are a wee bit inaccurate.

If improvements are to be made, I would like to see some sort of advanced editing whereby defined sections of the tune could be filed away and re-ordered into a song format. Self-created envelopes could also be stored in this way to allow access to the sound parameters more quickly: an envelope file as it were.

If you were only going to buy one music program, then buy The Music Box for the 128. It's a definite winner, and will take a lot of beating.

Publisher: Melbourne House
Price: £9.95
Memory: 128K

Bebopalula that's my Spectrum...

Everyone knows the Spectrum 128 has a great little sound chip inside, but apart from what is explained in the booklet - I refuse to call 14 pages a manual - there is no information around yet on how to use it.

In particular, those who have difficulty recognising tunes by the letters of the notes will find writing music in 128 Basic frustrating, logical though the system is. Melbourne House has come to the rescue with 128 Music Box, a substantial upgrade on Wham! The Music Box which was released a few months ago for the 48K machine.

That was a superb piece of programming in its own right, but the added benefits of the new sound chip make the 128 version an extremely powerful tool for composing music.

The EDIT mode is where all the action happens. You are presented with a screen showing a stave of music which scrolls across as you write, and a keyboard below which indicates the note you are playing. You can work over four octaves and extend that range further if you desire. Each channel is written independently of the other two, and you can set different qualities of tone for each, and also use loops to repeat a particular channel.

Unfortunately, you are compelled to use the same single basic unit for each note, with no variation in duration. That is annoying if you are able to read music, because tunes look rather different in this simplified notation, but it does mean non-musicians do not have to worry about crochets, quavers and so on. If you want a long note, you simply put two or more notes side by side. Unless you are using a sound envelope, which makes those notes sound staccato and disjointed, they will all be run together.

Sound envelopes define the way a sound builds or dies away. A piano, for example, will normally have a sound envelope which decays towards the end of a note as the note fades slightly. An organ, on the other hand, stays loud throughout the note, while reed instruments, such as saxophones or mouth organs, would have a spiky type of envelope which is the result of the reed's vibrations.

Those can all be programmed into 128 Music Box which contains eight definable envelopes. One of those is used for white noise sound effects - explosions, hisses and some types of drum beat come into that category - but the other seven can be altered to your taste and used in any combination on each of the three channels. For example, you could define seven saxophone-type sounds and use them to make subtle changes in the 'performance' of your music.

Noise effects are a combination of frequency and envelope - you can set up nine of those and bring them into your tune at will, though they will take up one of the channels. Startling variations of sound effect are possible and experimentation is the best way to decide what you want.

The program also includes the facility to save your tunes on tape, microdrive or RAM disc. I was particularly pleased to see the last, and hope software writers take advantage of the RAM disc for saving game positions as well. You can also compile the tune into a compact piece of machine code which contains the routines for playing the tune. The music can then be inserted into a program independently of the Music Box software, although it cannot be easily edited in that form.

The ease of use is remarkable, and the results extremely impressive: "That sounds professional," remarked Clare Edgeley on hearing my first efforts. In fact, it's been hard to drag myself away from our office 128 long enough to write this review. In the absence of a proper book on using the 128 sound chip, and for those who doubt if they would understand such a book anyway, 128 Music Box is the essential program to buy.

Anyone who has forked out for a 128K and does not buy this program is missing out on one of the most entertaining aspects of computing, and one which is set to take off this year in a big, big way. Well done Melbourne House - the first 128K Sinclair User Classic.

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

Melbourne House
£9.95

The Music Box from Melbourne House brings advanced music programming within the reach of anyone with a Spectrum 48K or 128K, even if they have very little knowledge of music. Apart from being a flexible music creator, it is also a programming aid because any composition can be compiled and saved for later use in your own programs.

There are two versions of the program on the cassette. The second version allows access to the special facilities of the 128 such as envelope shaping and RAM disk access.

The 48K version allows access to two voices, each spanning four octaves. The lower two rows of the keyboard are defined as a single octave musical keyboard for entering the notes. With a range of four semitones over the octave, the span is so wide that you can write some tunes without ever having to change your octave setting. The upper keys allow access to the special functions and voice or octave selection.

Selecting the Edit function from the menu screen reveals the main music making screen. A piano keyboard is depicted at the bottom of the picture under the array of windows which display the current status of the chosen voice. Above this is an extended musical stave on which the notes appear as they are played. The stave scrolls from right to left as each note is entered. The program only allows the entering of quavers but this is merely an arbitrary concession to traditional musical notation. If longer notes are required it is possible to repeat a series of quavers set to the some pitch which will then be played as a continuous note. Shorter notes can be set by altering the tempo of the tune and extending the length of longer notes accordingly.

One of three percussion effects can be selected from the three set effects or these can be reshaped to suit your own requirements. These sounds use both voices so notes and percussion cannot be sounded at the same time.

The 128 version is much more versatile. Envelopes can be reshaped several times during a tune, notes can be bent and there is access to three voices. One of the voices may be reserved for the wider range of nine redefinable percussion sounds, but notes can still be added here and there if the composition demands it.

Although all compositions are depicted in the key of C major, this does not limit the range of tunes which can be played. The inclusion of semitones (the black keys) on the keyboard means that this restriction only limits the way in which the tunes are displayed on the stave.

The Music Box has been designed to be as user friendly as possible and it certainly achieves its aims. The main problem for the musical novice will be deciding the relative length of each note but this skill will come with practice. The main advantage of this program is the compiler which allows the tune to be played constantly over a menu screen or note by note if you want to integrate it with an action screen.

This program should appeal to both the budding Beethovens out there or the games writer who wants to add the extra ingredient of music to give the final polish to their gleaming creation.