Comment by elihu

> There is the MPE specification which allows individual note bending, however it is not supported by any python library as far as I can tell. One could try to hack something with channel pitch bends, but it would be limited to playing 16 notes at the same time.

In practice, that's not usually a problem. That's a lot of polyphony. Technically if you're following the MPE spec, you only get 15 channels because one channel is reserved for sending commands that affect all voices at once. (Like you can send one pitch bend on the reserved channel and have it affect all 15 other channels at once. Likewise for program change and CC messages.)

MPE is kind of a weird way to do things but it actually works pretty well. And one of the nice things about it is that if you go to the trouble to support MPE, it's a pretty easy step to support pre-MPE multitimbral synths -- though each one tends to have its own quirks that have to be worked around.

I've been working on a just intonation MPE controller, and have gotten it to work with a bunch of old 80s-90s-2000's hardware synths. I've considered that it might be worthwhile to eventually split that code out into a separate library so other projects that want to use old Yamahas/Rolands/Korgs/E-mus etc.. in a microtonal way they don't have to reinvent the wheel.