tintinnabuli

tintinnabuli pairs every note you play with a bell tone from a fixed triad.

This is the technique Arvo Pärt has built on since Für Alina: a melody voice (the M-voice) shadowed by a tintinnabuli voice (the T-voice) that only ever sounds tones of the tonic triad, a small bell struck alongside each melody note. Whatever you play is the M-voice. Each note-on also sounds a T-voice: the nearest (position=1) or second-nearest (position=2) triad tone strictly above the played key ("superior"), strictly below it ("inferior"), or "alternating" sides per note, starting above. Strictly means a played triad tone still gets a neighbor, never a doubling. The T-voice sounds at level of the played velocity, floored at 1; when the walk runs off the keyboard, only your note sounds.

The mapping is deterministic, no seed. The emitted pair is remembered per note, so note-offs, retriggers, and scene switches release exactly the two keys that are sounding.

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Range
root	note name	required	"c", "f#", "bb", or "0".."11"
minor	boolean	true	true, false
position	integer	1	1..=2
direction	string	"superior"	"superior", "inferior", "alternating"
level	number	0.8	0..=1

root takes a note name, a letter a..g with an optional # or b ("c", "f#", "bb", case does not matter), or a pitch class written "0".."11". Together with minor it fixes the triad the T-voice draws from: root, third, and fifth.

Example

The Pärt scene from examples/harmony.kdl, an A minor bell under a Feldman hush:

miditool.kdl

input "Roland"
output virtual="miditool Out"

tintinnabuli root="a" minor=true position=1 direction="superior" level=0.7
feldman-field seed=3 floor=6 ceiling=22 jitter=3

Play a slow line and every note arrives with the nearest A minor triad tone above it, at a fraction of the touch.

Try this

Open the interval and let the bell swing over and under the melody:

tintinnabuli root="c" minor=false position=2 direction="alternating"

Position 2 skips past the nearest triad tone to the second, so the companion sits a fourth to a sixth away, and alternating flips it above and below on successive notes. Drop level toward 0.3 and the second voice recedes into resonance.