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Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Mr Robert Walker
support@bouncemetronome.com
0144 01865432977
25 Lincoln Rd, Oxford, OX1 4TB England.

First Release of Bounce Metronome Pro - with Swing, Advanced Rhythms and Drum Stick or Conductor's Baton Visuals

This metronome uses bounces to help you keep in time, just as conductors often do. It's especially easy to clap or play in time with the bounces of a ball when it hits the ground. Bounce Metronome Pro can show bounces following any rhythm, as a drum stick, ball or baton. This innovative metronome with gravity bounce visuals has just been released by Robert Inventor.

"It's like having your own conductor to help you keep in time"

In fact, conductors often bounce the baton off an "invisible plane" to help show the moments of the beats precisely. This helps the instruments of the orchestra to play exactly in time with each other.

"The motion is like bouncing a golf ball on pavement. Your performers must be trained to play exactly at the bottom of the beat."
P 19, Brock McElheran, "Conducting Technique for beginners and professionals".

This makes it suitable as a silent metronome. It's also an accessible metronome for deaf musicians too. All except a couple of the rarely used rhythm features can be played purely visually. It is also extremely easy to use.

"You can use Bounce Metronome Pro with the sound switched off as a silent metronome."

This bounce idea was also used in the early "Car-tune" silent movies (as well as some of the first movies with sound) - a ball bounced on the lyrics to help the audience sing along. In fact Bounce Metronome Pro has an option to show a ball bouncing on lyrics as well, like the early movies.

With this innovation, the visuals become primary, and it becomes much easier to practise rhythms with swing and irregular beats as you can anticipate the exact moment of an irregular beat visually. It is like having your own personal conductor to help you keep in time.

Bounce Metronome Pro exploits these new irregular beat possibilities to the full. You can use it with any amount of swing, as used in jazz, Scottish or Irish traditional music, the notes inégal of early French music, etc.

Or if swing isn't your thing, you may still find it easier to play along with a metronome with a gentle lilt to it, to give a natural feel to the rhythm. Of course you can play the regular ticks of a conventional metronome too.

You can also practice many rhythms not often found in metronomes such as syncopated rhythms and polyrhythms (up to 16 rhythms played simultaneously with any number of notes for each one). You can also practice unusual time signatures like 5/4, 7/4 etc split, for instance 7/4 as 4+3 / 4 or 3+4 /4 etc. or play the more complex additive rhythms such as 3+2+3 /8 that you get in some types of music. Or, moving towards the more exotic, you can also practice 4/3 mixed with 4/4 and other so called "irrational time signatures". With all these rhythms you can set the visuals to bounce following conducting patterns - the ones used are those set out in Brock McElheran's "Conducting Technique for beginners and professionals" (more may be added later on).

But that doesn't begin to exhaust the range of possibilities in Bounce Metronome Pro. More generally you can practice the long cycles of bars with different time signatures one after another used in some styles of music such as Bulgarian music, and Indian Tala. You can make your cycle from any of these rhythms and polyrhythms one after another.

You can even practice rhythms based on PHI (the golden ratio) and other "truly irrational numbers". You can simultaneously play one rhythm along with another rhythm augmented by PHI (so you have PHI beats to the bar, so the beats drift with respect to the bar line). This PHI rhythm is of particular interest as it is in a sense the "most polyrhythmic" possible rhythm. You can do this sort of thing with up to sixteen simultanous rhythms, and can augment by any numbers you like including also PI, root 2, and other irrational numbers.

Yet with all these advanced options available if you need them, it's simple intuitive interface makes it easy to use. You will be able to get started right away. For the most used rhythms, you just click the button for your preset rhythm. Then adjust the tempo using the handy dial. Or if you prefer to do it that way, just tap on the dial with the right button a few times at the desired tempo for your rhythm.

There's another handy feature which many metronome users will appreciate. You can practice gradual tempo changes, or set the tempo to increase gradually perhaps over several minutes to assist with learning a difficult piece. You can set how much to increase the tempo by, and how long the tempo change will take in minutes or seconds. For those who need it, you can also add extra tempo changes, any number, one after another.

For the ultimate in flexibility, you can use the built in scripting system. It lets you set up each bar with its own rhythm, instruments and so on. It also lets you make continuous changes too, for instance, slowly vary the tempo or volume, or both. It comes with auto script so that you can just click on a numerical value anywhere in Bounce Metronome Pro to automatically add it as a script line to the desired bar in the script.

Here is a novel feature for a metronome (as far as I know anyway): Bounce Metronome Pro can play dance rhythms with mixes of notes of different value e.g. eighth notes mixed with dotted quarter notes and so forth. There's a drop list of preset example rhythms to get you started such as Waltz, Original Tango rhythm (dos por cuatro) etc.

You can also combine several such rhythms played simultaneously on different instruments, with different stereo pan locations etc. One particularly useful application of this: you can play the two sticks of a paradiddle panned left and right as RLRRLRLL etc. The drum stick visuals will be synchronised with the rhythm, for instance with a separate stick for the left and right parts for a paradiddle.

You can tap out the entire rhythm (or rhythms) for the metronome too, using the PC keyboard or mouse. Or adjust the times and volumes of beats individually with click and drag on a visual display - or adjust the timings and volumes of individual beats as numbers. You can also get a rhythm from a recording - click on the beats in the display of the recording to set the metronome times.

Bounce Metronome Pro is accessible to blind musicians. There's a special interface designed for use with a screen reader (tested with Jaws, Window Eyes, Thunder and Microsoft Narrator), and if you are blind you can play all the same rhythms. Indeed you can use most of the the same features too - the only ones not accessible to blind users are the gravity bounce visuals of course, and that feature to get the beats from a visual display of a recording.

For those who can see but need high contrast visuals, all the visuals are customisable. There are black on white and white on black preset colour schemes for the tempo dial and bounces. If you have your windows colour scheme set to one of these then the appropriate visuals in Bounce Metronome Pro will be preset for you automatically.

It's also colour blind friendly - any important icons are distinguished by shape as well as by colour so the visuals are suitable for monochromats who can't distinguish colours at all. Also, red and blue are the main colours used throughout, with variation of saturation, so that the most significant colours (e.g. the bouncing balls for the first two parts) will be easily distinguished by colour-blind dichromats. All the colours such as the colours of the bouncing balls can be customised to your taste.

You can use any of the instruments on your soundcard or other midi instruments, melodic or non melodic, because it plays the notes via midi. You can also use its Wave Shape Player which makes instrument sounds from mathematical waveforms, and comes with a menu of preset instruments.

For those who are keen on C-Sound, it has a drop list of preset C-Sound instruments to choose from, just select the instruments and your C-Sound orchestra is ready to play right away. There is no need to edit the code or even look at it, as all that is done by the automated orchestra builder. C-Sound experts can convert their own C-Sound instruments by adding a few sections to the csd files, mainly to specify the parameters the instrument expects. You can also convert DX7 sysexes into C-Sound instruments already set up for the automated orchestra builder, using a special modification of Jeff Harrington's free DX7 to CSound converter

It has melodic features too. Randomly generate a tune using fractals, to get an idea of the way your rhythm sounds melodically. Or play the intriguing and harmonious polyrhythmic harmonic metronomes - based on the harmonic series. Or try out the truly irrational rhythms, such as the golden ratio based rhythm - the most inharmonic possible musical interval combined with the most polyrhythmic possible rhythm.

All within a simple to use program with all the main features easily accessible and clearly set out. It has a clean, hot highlighted, skinnable, modern user interface.

To find out more about all its features, listen to audio clips, watch animations, and download the program, visit http://www.bouncemetronome.com

# # #
Software Name: Bounce Metronome Pro
First release: Wednesday April 15th 2009
Capabilities: Bouncing ball, drum stick or conductor's baton visuals. Accessible for blind, colour blind, visually impaired and deaf musicians. Rhythm capabilities include: any time signature, polyrhythms, cycle of rhythms, dance rhythms and paradiddles etc, swing, syncopated rhythms, and gradual tempo changes. Has melodic capabilities including the randomised fractal tunes, and the harmonious intriguing harmonic polyrhythmic metronomes. Can play any midi instrument, also CSound instruments and its own in-build Wave Shape Player instruments.
More Screen shots are available here: http://www.bouncemetronome.com/screen_shots.htm
Pad file: http://robertinventor.com/bm_pad_file.xml 

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