Bryan Creer wrote: | Starling (?) wrote - | | >It might be better to have the duration of the chord | >equal to the shortest duration within the chord. That way | >[L:1/4][A4G2E2] is implicitly equal to a half note, just as in | >keyboard music the shortest note in the chord is considered the length | >before the next note begins. | | Whoops! Back to the dawing board.
There is a lot of abc that would give strange results from the shortest-note rule. Recently someone pointed out that some of my files have notation like [A3G] with no length for the second note. There's a reason for this. The reason is that, a few years ago, when I was first learning to use abc, I came across description of this notation but few examples. So I did the obvious thing, I experimented. The only tool I had at the time that ran on a unix-type system was abc2ps, so I used that. Simple experiments showed that, while a length after the second note was accepted, it had no effect whatsoever. Only the length of the first note was used. I was a bit disappointed, since I was quite familiar with staff notation that put different note heads on a single stem. But the tests showed that "abc couldn't do this", and the length of the first note was always applied to the rest of the notes. So, of course, I used that syntax. Some time later I stumbled across discussions of the topic, and it became clear that abc's actual syntax was that chord notes could have different lengths, although some programs might not honor them. So I've been trying since then to dutifully put correct lengths on all of them, with the expectation that eventually all abc tools would do the Right Thing. I've also corrected some of my earlier efforts. But, of course, this is easy to overlook, and I'm not at all surprised that I still have tunes that use only the one length. It's a fact of life that users will learn how things work by trying them out. The documentation is often sketchy and ambiguous, and many users don't even know how to find it. And few people will start off by collecting all software for all machines. I don't have the time or money for this, and I doubt there are many other musicians who do. As an illustration of the difficulty a novice may have finding abc documentation, I just went to the abc "home page" and did a search for the strings "doc" and "manual". Neither string exists in that rather large page. This is perhaps a silly example, but it does show why users might try experimentation over looking for documentation. Given the fact that at least one major and early abc program uses the "first note" rule for chord lengths, we might be semi-stuck with that for at least a few years. Violating it will give unintended results for a good amount of the abc that already exists. The most practical approach might be to document the problem, recommend that people put lengths on all notes in a chord, and state that the official length is not well defined. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
