Musical transformations
Dorico Pro provides multiple tools for transforming pitches and rhythms, including reversing and inverting pitches and rotating rhythms.
In Dorico Pro, the term “musical transformations” covers the following methods of changing the pitch and/or rhythm of notes:
- Inversion
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The melodic contours of phrases are switched upside-down by forcing pitch intervals between notes in the opposite direction, such as a note originally a fifth above the previous note becoming a fifth below the previous note.
- Reversal
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The order of notes, including pitches and/or rhythms, and items is reversed so they are played backwards; for example, the first note of a phrase becoming the last note. Also known as “retrograde”.
- Rotation
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Notes, including pitches and/or rhythms, and items are shifted along by a specified number of steps either forwards or backwards, so that, for example, the first note in a phrase’s original pitch is given to the second note, the second note’s pitch to the third note, and so on.
- Repetition
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The pitches of the specified number of notes at the start of a phrase is repeated across all subsequent notes in the selection.
- Pitch mapping
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Specified pitches are transposed to become other specified pitches, such as mapping all C♯s to D♭s.
- Scale mapping
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All notes in the specified source scale are transposed to become the equivalent notes in the destination scale according to their scale degree.
You can change the default behavior of musical transformations on the Musical Transformations page in Note Input Options. For example, you can set whether or not to allow transformations that would shorten the duration of the original selection.