Velocity

[faonfaon]

Hi,

Can we say that there is a relation between velocity and dynamics such as piano, forte, mezzo forte ?
I mean, did someone already decide for exemple that : "piano" is velocity from 50 to 70 and "forte" from 90 to 110 and then drew the curves ?

[stubbsonic]

I'm sure someone has made some kind of definitive "conversion scale", however, I think their efforts may be wasted. Kurzweil's K2xxx series even had some kind of velocity map editor that had ppp, pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff, fff and assigned the velocity ranges to those levels.

The issue is that you don't really know how the synth, sampler, virtual instrument, etc. will scale the volume & filter (etc.) You could make some general statements like ppp is from 1-20-ish. and fff is 120(ish)-127-- but how a dynamic will "read" is context sensitive and subjective.

I can see how a person who might be trying to design a program that will "listen" to MIDI and generate dynamic markings based on velocity values, might want to make some educated guesses. That's fine. Or a person wanting to "faithfully" capture a score might want to know if they are in the ballpark, with their playing. But I don't think it is going to be very reliable.

But taking it a little further, you could have a bunch of serious musicians listen to a range of notes and have them all move some pointers to where they think the dynamic ranges change-- then take the average of that and be done.

[faonfaon]

Thank you Stubbsonic ! That's interesting !