50Hz vs 60Hz in music discussion - a case for 50Hz

There are 2 sides for this problem : the composer's side and the listener's side.

In Japan and Korea, all the machines work at 60 hz. So, it means that all composers and listeners will find normal the 60 Hz speed, especially for the music, but also for the game itself.

In Europe, before some people imported MSX2+ machines, it was seen as normal to compose, play and listen at 50 Hz as all European MSX1/2 machines use this frequency. So, it means also that all was composed in Europe before the arrival of imported MSX2+ machines is generally at 50 Hz. After that, it becomes more difficult, as some composers still worked on European machines and others switched to real MSX2+ (not an upgraded MSX2 to MSX2+) or TurboR. If the program does not switch automatically after booting to the frequency that the composer prefers, well, you need to guess it !!!

For Brazil, I don't know what I must say, as the Brazilian machines uses a PAL variant that is close to NTSC. Maybe a Brazilian user can explain his feeling about 50/60 Hz.

But in all cases outside Japan and Korea, I think that the definitive choice/preference is in the hands (more exactly the ears) of the end-user. Just a simple example : maybe BiFi has composed his Third Screen demo on a TurboR, but there's no any readme.txt to confirm that. Some people prefer to run this demo on a TurboR (and therefore at 60HZ), but personnally, I think that the musical harmony between rhythm and melody is really better at 50 Hz.

There are also intelligent demos where the sound is exactly the same at both frequencies, because the composer/coder has adapted the music routine to get this result. It's for example the case of the Near Dark productions!

Yes, I know Japanese composers had to deal with 60Hz so they probably chose their tempos based on that.
But is this 50/60 Hz thing a choice of the composer, or a restriction? Did they compose their music on some restricted 8-bit machine, or did a lot of it come from a place without those restrictions?
Maybe they used MIDI to compose, and then funneled what they made into an MSX?

What I tried to put forward is the idea that this 50/60Hz thing might have led to choosing a tempo that they didn't have exactly in mind, and that perhaps the 50Hz version would have been more what they intended.
Like I said, there often aren't many options in tempos when you're tied to VSYNC. Timing music on an awfully slow clock like VSYNC is *very* restrictive.

Being a musician myself (and having dealt with the same issue in those days), I often find some of those tracks too fast at 60Hz. But when you consider what they had to deal with, it often must have been a choice between "somewhat too fast" and "way too slow" at 60Hz. Not always, but often still.

In those cases where they chose "somewhat too fast", listening to them at 50Hz sounds better. I'd bet some of the original composers would agree in some cases.

Forget that PAL vs NTSC machine picking thing!
One can have players that give any BPM you like, running SAME on both machines.

I wrote about it here
http://www.msx.org/forum/development/msx-development/scc-wav...
"on PAL add 600 and on NTSC add 500"

Totally agree, 60hz is the way it must be. I don't thinks that composes for 60hz must limit more than compose for 50hz, it's simply a technical issue. Nowadays I'm used to listen them at 60hz and I can't return to 50hz.

Yeah, but that's a moot point if the music player is hard synced to vsync isn't it?
Swing is good, but imho there's a difference between a good human feel and the timing just being off because of technical restraints. TBH I didn't try try alternating between 5 and 6 ticks per 16th, maybe it happens to sound good it some cases but that's a bit of happenstance then I suppose.