Temporal Weight

Eventually, this will outline the concept the temporal weight.

For now, here are some words based on a comment I made on the lines forum:

Temporal Weight offers a different way to think about tempo control in a sequenced work.

Most DAWs manage tempo with some sort of global tempo control that is managed with automation curve. Drop any notes into slow regions, they ll be be slower. Drop any notes into faster regions, they ll be faster.

Temporal weight reverses the relationship of notes and global tempo. The main idea is that each note has mass which bends and fluctuates the relative tempo around it. A note with more temporal mass will warp the tempo and make it faster. A note with negative temporal mass will make it slower. Masses are not in units of BPM, it s all a relative scale that can get adjusted elsewhere. I also made it so a note can control the inertia, or how quickly the tempo responds to changes from the notes.

This approach can be very useful when sequencing lyrical pieces of music that have a lot of tempo stretching/compression in it. Working out the weights of each notes requires thinking about the overall musical phrasing. What is cool here is that this approach can be more one than one valid interpretation this way. Once the weights are in, the tempo curve gets generated implicitly.

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