Nu-Scale — a Historical Microtonal MIDI Application

History

1988

Nu-Scale was the first software application (1988) ever written to arbitrarily retune synthesizers which did not support retuning capabilities. This enabled me to retune early classic MIDI synths like the Sequential Prophet VS and Roland D-50 even though they had no microtonal features at all. Of course it also worked with later synths as well.

The original 1988-1991 version ran on the Atari ST computer and included writing a custom MIDI interrupt driver in 68000 assembly language. It was used by myself and a few friends for writing microtonal music and also used to capture ethnic scales from a few master musicians from overseas.

1994

In 1994, I wrote a manual and publically released the stable 1991 version 4 of the application to all those who requested it, as a response to some heated public discussions between self-styled experts as to why retuning by this method was “not possible” and “would never work”. At that time I had already been using Nu-Scale productively to write and explore microtonal music for six years! I resumed work on Nuscale, adding some advanced features and it worked its way up to version 23 over the next year.

1995

In 1995, Nuscale was ported to the Mac using the OMS MIDI driver. This was enough to get the basics working but was nowhere near what was needed for a distributable release — robust, distributable software requires about ten times the effort of that of software that just works. Nor was it a fraction of the functionality of the Atari version. This porting work was put aside while I completed school. The Atari version worked fine for all my personal retuning needs, but I had just gotten the Mac and wanted to see what I could do with it. I also spent some time developing a number of 3D audio algorithms for use in my own music, so finishing the Nuscale port to the Mac was low priority. I then went on to work designing digital synthesis ASICs and architecting and implementing real-time scriptable multi-channel effects processors, and got working the world’s first multi-stream real-time positional audio engine, being a port of one of my 3D audio algorithms to a custom family of audio engine chips I helped design, including one that was used on the first PCI bus compatible audio card.

2003

Great news! The best features of Nuscale have been merged into Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven! Nuscale has returned!