Microtonal Music is music using more than 12 tones per octave. I compose music using Csound and a preprocessor I wrote in Turbo Pascal. I post small updates as the compositions are being created, and a few final versions once I'm done. I strive towards music that could be played if we had the instruments capable of playing the notes. Think of it as "fake but accurate".
Here's one that took a while to make. I was able to build Csound v5 under Linux on an IBM mainframe Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), thanks to an IBM developer program. Csound is back on the mainframe after not seeing such an architecture for probably 40 years. It runs pretty fast, but that's not the reason to build it on the platform. I just wanted to understand the challenges of moving to the s390x architecture, since I sell mainframes for a living, and most of my customers have Linux today.
Today's version of June Gloom was converted from my source code to Csound input on my PC under Free Pascal, shipped to the mainframe as drum12.csd, then processed by Csound on the mainframe to create a .wav file. I brought that back to my PC to create an MP3 file and posted here.
Here's a version made on a Linux implementation on Amazon's Web Services. Now that my preprocessor has been ported to open source Free Pascal, it was a snap to compile it on an Ubuntu Linux instance. Csound only needed a simple install. It's my first try at Linux. Next stop: RedHat under z/VM on an IBM IFL at their developer sandbox. Unfortunately, there's no port of Free Pascal that supports the z architecture or instruction set, and I'll have to build Csound myself. I think the latter will be easier than the former. I can do the preprocessor work on my desktop and ship the Csound source to the cloud for processing.
