Laurie wrote: | ... In fixing the restrictions on within-staff, | within-voice polyphony - and in particular in trying to type in various | keyboard parts (The Messiah being the biggest) I found that the rule that | seemed to work was "shortest note wins". So that is the rule used within | the body of Muse2. I chose it because it seemed to work. The worst that | can happen is that you have to pad out one of the unnamed "voices" with a | rest. i.e. [D4G]zFE D4.
Hmmm ... It seems to me that the "melody" you'd hear here would be GzFE D4. This would mean that [GD4]zFE D4 would be a good way to write this for a player that treated the first note as the melody. This would also work with the "first note" and "shortest note" length rules. I've written out a fair amount of fiddle music that would be easy if I could use this approach. But since abc's current rules really don't say what happens in such cases, I've been a bit careful about such things. Most often, I just ignore this sort of "drone" note, and excuse the omission on the grounds that someone who knows the style will know to play it anyway. | I can tolerate a different rule for ABC input and output from that within | the body of Muse2. Output is easy I could just sort the chords to be | shortest-first. Input is a little trickier, I'd have to invent that z. Perhaps a good approach would be to legitimize the idea of putting a length after a chord, but if it it omitted, it defaults to either the first or the shortest length. Currently, abc2ps uses the first note's length, but this shouldn't be terribly difficult to change. | But I'm not particularly convinced that it's a good idea. I do have some | sympathy with the "first note is the melody" idea - and we can't have both. This idea is in use already, and it's musically valuable to know what the melody note is. So if it's not the first note in a chord, we'll want a way to say which it is. The current players that use the "first note is melody" rule probably all do this because it's easy to implement. There's a good chance that, if some other schemes were used, implementers would casually ignore it, and justify this on the grounds that you can't demand that they implement every obscure feature in the first release. Writing an abc player is a sufficiently complex task that you'd expect them to take a lot of short cuts initially. So we'll probably always have some abc software that "until I have time to fix it" ignores all but the first note of chords. | I had a few complaints (actually very few) about the severe restriction in | Muse (Muse-1 that is). It insisted that all notes within a chord be the | same length and required that you either essentially ignored when the notes | ended (as apparently Bach did because his prelude No.1 is written out as all | quavers but he used to hold all the notes down when he played it) or else | write it all out with ties (which can look pretty bad on the page). This can also be handled by something else that's common in piano and guitar music: a "hanging" tie to the right of a note that means "Let this note sound" for an unspecified time. There's no way that I know to say this in abc at present. It's yet another way that keyboard and guitar music is the worst case for music notation. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
