RE: What about musical notation?
About 25 years ago, I and several friends set some music in our church publications (newsletters and handouts for the congregation) using transfer symbols and photocopying. The process is definitely not suitable for serious publication. I saw a 19th century American music book set from movable type in the Newark, NJ public library about 35 years ago. Naturally I have no idea of the title or publisher now. :( In addition to its inflexibility, movable type is not well suited to music because it is difficult to get lines to join smoothly. At 8:26 AM -0800 2/22/01, Figge, Donald wrote: About thirty years ago, I was involved in the production of a song book. At that time, the notes were engraved directly onto copper plates by artisans who specialized in music engraving. Repro proofs were made from the plates, and then the words were pasted onto the proofs. Don // -Original Message- From: William Overington [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 3:53 AM To: Unicode List Subject: Re: What about musical notation? - - Does anyone know of any details of metal music type please? William Overington 22 February 2001 -- Edward Cherlin Generalist "A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it." Alice in Wonderland
Re: What about musical notation?
At 3:52 AM -0800 2/22/01, William Overington wrote: Having been advised recently about accessing 21 bit unicode characters using an example from musical notation, following up on that advice I have found the document that details characters in the range U+1d100 to U+1d1ff, entitled Musical Symbols. [snip] I find myself interested in the possibility that unicode could be used to encode as a sequence of characters a representation of the contents of the composing stick of a hand set metal type printer, including the various items of spacing material of which the viewer of a finished print is not aware. One application at present would be so that fine quality type set illustrations of music and mathematics could be produced by placing that sequence of codes in the param statement of a java applet in a web page. Does anyone know of any details of metal music type please? William Overington 22 February 2001 The TeX DVI output file format does something close to what you describe by putting items and expressions composed from basic characters into boxes, and specifying the location of each box. Both horizontal and vertical spacing are expressed in integer multiples of the basic unit, 1/65536 of a true printer's point (1/72.27 in.). Font sizes are also specified in the same unit. The TeX source format includes codes for the common typographical spaces, several more specialized math spaces, and a general concept of "glue" spaces with numeric stretch and shrink parameters, including three orders of infinite stretchability. Further spacing control is provided in tables. Most software that handles mathematical expressions can translate them to TeX. This includes high-end math software such as Mathematica, technical publishing applications, notably FrameMaker, and ordinary word processors with built-in expression editors. In some cases, the translation from a word processing format requires an external utility. I suggest, therefore, that writing a downloadable TeX DVI renderer plug-in for a Web browser is a more general long-term solution for your application. Most of the code you would need is available as open source in C. It would not surprise me if a DVI renderer in Java had been done somewhere, although I have not heard of one. There is a Unicode TeX, called Omega TeX, capable of handling any writing system in principle, and supporting a fair number of writing systems in practice. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist "A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it." Alice in Wonderland
Re: What about musical notation?
Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I suggest, therefore, that writing a downloadable TeX DVI renderer plug-in for a Web browser is a more general long-term solution for your application. Most of the code you would need is available as open source in C. It would not surprise me if a DVI renderer in Java had been done somewhere, although I have not heard of one. There's a Java DVI viewer available at: http://www.geom.umn.edu/java/idvi/ However, it's not free software (it's only for non-commercial use).
Re: What about musical notation?
One application at present would be so that fine quality type set illustrations of music and mathematics could be produced by placing that sequence of codes in the param statement of a java applet in a web page. You may have a look at Lilypond, which is a free musical typesetting engine producing output for TeX (direct PS output is still experimental). http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/lilypond/index.html Werner
Re: What about musical notation?
Having been advised recently about accessing 21 bit unicode characters using an example from musical notation, following up on that advice I have found the document that details characters in the range U+1d100 to U+1d1ff, entitled Musical Symbols. I began wondering about how one would use unicode to display music and searching back through my mailbox I found this thread which has answered some questions and prompted some more. Am I right in thinking that in the days when hand set metal type on printing presses was the only method of printing that there were fonts of musical type? I have never seen any font of such type myself, though I have seen fonts for such non-text matters as chess sets and crossword puzzles. The chess set fonts are great fun because in order to produce a setting of the 64 squares of a chess board one needs type sorts for all permutations of each type of piece in both colours of piece and on each colour of square. So a chess font has many more pieces than does an ordinary chess set. The white squares are blank and the black squares are diagonally hatched. Producing a sequence of two prints that are a knight's move apart means taking out the knight sort from the setting and replacing it with an empty square of the same colour of square and taking out the sort that is at the destination square and replacing it with a sort of a knight of the same colour on the same colour of square as the destination square had in the first place. The sort used for the knight in the second picture cannot be the same sort as used for the knight in the first picture as a knight's move always ends on a different colour square from the colour on which it started. Moving a king, a queen a rook or a pawn may use the same sort or a different sort for the chess piece depending on the move made. A bishop will always use the same sort for a move. Castling is something else, both King's side castling and Queen's side castling being interesting type setting exercises. I realize that the setting of music from music type might not be as straightforward as is the setting of a position in a chess game as the sorts in a chess font that represent the squares and the chess pieces upon them (that is, all the items of type except the border pieces) are of the same size and are square. So, I am left wondering as to how unicode will be used to set music. It does seem to me that if printers from long ago could have fonts of metal music type and produce good results that it should be possible to have a method using a straight sequence of unicode characters that can produce a representation of a skilful setting of music. While on the subject of specialist settings, could someone say how one expresses a mathematical formula using unicode please, or is it, as it appears music is at present, beyond the scope of what unicode can presently achieve? I find myself interested in the possibility that unicode could be used to encode as a sequence of characters a representation of the contents of the composing stick of a hand set metal type printer, including the various items of spacing material of which the viewer of a finished print is not aware. One application at present would be so that fine quality type set illustrations of music and mathematics could be produced by placing that sequence of codes in the param statement of a java applet in a web page. Does anyone know of any details of metal music type please? William Overington 22 February 2001
Re: What about musical notation?
Am I right in thinking that in the days when hand set metal type on printing presses was the only method of printing that there were fonts of musical type? I have never seen any font of such type myself, though I have seen fonts for such non-text matters as chess sets and crossword puzzles. As far as I know, music printing with mobile letters of this kind was indeed done, mostly back in the 16th/17th century. There were "letters" which each represented one fragment of a stave with one or several noteheads on them. It tended to look pretty rough, though. Almost as if we were to put staves together from ASCII characters like: ---o--- ---| ---| ---| High-quality printing since the mid-18th century has been done by engraving or etching in metal plates, where the graphics are either first drawn by hand on the metal surface, or applied to it with stamps of some sort. Lukas
Re: What about musical notation?
At 03:52 AM 2/22/2001 -0800, William Overington wrote: Am I right in thinking that in the days when hand set metal type on printing presses was the only method of printing that there were fonts of musical type? I have never seen any font of such type myself, though I have seen fonts for such non-text matters as chess sets and crossword puzzles. Oh yes, definitely. Music was printed from metal type from quite an early stage in the development of print. There is a good book by Mary Kay Duggan on the printing of music in renaissance Italy, _Italian Music Incunabula: Printer and Type_. There is also a useful bibliographical volume by Guy Marco, _The Earliest Music Printers of Continental Europe: A Checklist of Facsimiles Illustrating Their Work_, which will point you toward more samples from the early period. Interestingly -- well, interestingly for type geeks like me -- the only surviving examples of counter punches in a public collection are for music types: two small but very important pieces steel at the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks | Vancouver, BC | All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. www.tiro.com | W.B. Yeats [EMAIL PROTECTED]|
Re: What about musical notation?
In a message dated 2001-02-22 04:30:20 Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: So, I am left wondering as to how unicode will be used to set music. Unicode only provides the symbols -- the building blocks -- needed to set music. The process of taking these building blocks and creating a full Wagner score (or folk tune) is a matter of three-dimensional layout, which is outside the scope of Unicode. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: What about musical notation?
At 07:58 -0800 2001-02-22, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unicode only provides the symbols -- the building blocks -- needed to set music. The process of taking these building blocks and creating a full Wagner score (or folk tune) is a matter of three-dimensional layout, which is outside the scope of Unicode. Presently, at any rate. Who's to say that all the music software companies won't one day, 20 years from now, agree a character-based way to set music and interchange data. But there's nothing like that on the horizon today. -- Michael Everson ** Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.egt.ie 15 Port Chaeimhghein ochtarach; Baile tha Cliath 2; ire/Ireland Mob +353 86 807 9169 ** Fax +353 1 478 2597 ** Vox +353 1 478 2597 27 Pirc an Fhithlinn; Baile an Bhthair; Co. tha Cliath; ire
RE: What about musical notation?
About thirty years ago, I was involved in the production of a song book. At that time, the notes were engraved directly onto copper plates by artisans who specialized in music engraving. Repro proofs were made from the plates, and then the words were pasted onto the proofs. Don // -Original Message- From: William Overington [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 3:53 AM To: Unicode List Subject: Re: What about musical notation? - - Does anyone know of any details of metal music type please? William Overington 22 February 2001
Re: What about musical notation?
In a (private) message dated 2001-02-22 08:47:26 Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Wagner score (or folk tune) is a matter of three-dimensional layout, which is outside the scope of Unicode. You probably meant *bi*-dimensional layout, right? Of course I did. Duh. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: What about musical notation?
At 04:44 AM 2/22/01, Lukas Pietsch wrote: As far as I know, music printing with mobile letters of this kind was indeed done, mostly back in the 16th/17th century. There were "letters" which each represented one fragment of a stave with one or several noteheads on them. It tended to look pretty rough, though. I used a scan beneath the navigation at http://www.tapiasgold.com/home.html. The use of these "staff sorts" was a technological advance that allowed music to be printed in much the same way as text. A lot of our knowledge of 16th C. European secular music is based on mass-produced printed works of a type unavailable in the previous century. -- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Biological Sciences Department Voice: (909) 869-4062 California State Polytechnic University FAX: (909) 869-4078 Pomona CA 91768-4032 USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What about musical notation?
... *** * ENGLISH VERSION * *** I read the code approved (but not released yet), but exists a deficiency (from my point of view) and giving to Perry Roland all my admiration for the excellent work: -Talking strictly about the notes; the convention approved is focusing to "draw" music, but it is not giving it a meaning to the position where each note is, what I try to say is, a NATURAL on "Fa" has NOT the same value (meaning) on "La". Thinking a little bit how to improve it, is asigning caracters for position (similar to super- scripts and subscripts) in order to have a unique graphic representation, but with meaning (determined by the position on the block)... Representing music well requires much more complication. There are at least 3 layers of time-dependency that should be shown (the envelope of the note, the total time for that note's envelope, and the primary frequency). There are also volume cues over time, and things like tremolo or vibrato or trill, secondary harmonics, "key" changes (which affects subsequent representation of those primary frequencies)... Yes, it would be nice to have a character-oriented way to notate music, but it doesn't lend itself well to one or two dimensions as the display of characters (well character "glyphs") usually is. John G. Otto Nisus Software, Engineering www.infoclick.com www.mathhelp.com www.nisus.com software4usa.com EasyAlarms PowerSleuth NisusEMail NisusWriter MailKeeper QUED/M My opinions are probably not those of Nisus Software, Inc.
Re: What about musical notation ?
On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 08:20:21PM -0800, Erik Garr?s wrote: Why the improvement?: To be able to store music (not symbols) in a condensed format into electronic media, so the players will "talk" what is written in "muscial language" (like some software do speaking phrases in some languages). Unicode is not a rich text format, nor a format for storing music. The symbols being encoded are for discussion in text, not for music storage. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Recovering from a hard drive "crash" - website down
Re: What about musical notation ?
Hello, I think Mr. Garres means the western musical notation invented in the 1200s, which is very widely, if not universally, used today. Unicode 3.0 actually already has at least 2 older forms of musical notation in the main Hebrew block and somewhere in the Arabic block---they are signs for chanting liturgically. These symbols are at least 1100 years old. Elaine Keown "Erik Garrés" wrote: I would like to know, why the symbols used for music are not listed on UNICODE ? Find the best deals on the web at AltaVista Shopping! http://www.shopping.altavista.com
Re: What about musical notation ?
Text on spanish and english Texto en español e inglés ** * VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL * ** Leí el código aprovado (pero aún no liberado), pero existe una deficiencia (a mi parecer) y sin menospreciar el excelente trabajo de Perry Roland: -Hablando específicamente de las notas; se enfoca a representar gráficamente una partitura, sin embargo no le está dando un significado a la posición que ocupa cada nota dentro del pentagrama, es decir, una negra en "Fa" no es lo mismo que en "La". Pensando un poco en como mejorarlo es asignar caracteres de posición (tal como se hace con índices y subíndices) para que conformen una sola representación gráfica, pero con significado (de acuerdo a la posición en el pentagrama). _ | |___| |__@_ ___@_ ¿Para qué mejorarlo?: Poder almacenar música (y no símbolos) de forma compacta en medios electrónicos, luego los reproductores electrónicos "hablarán" lo que se escribió en lenguaje musical (del mismo modo que ya existe software que habla lo que está escrito en cierto idioma) Gracias por su tiempo y atención, Erik Garrés *** * ENGLISH VERSION * *** I read the code approved (but not released yet), but exists a deficiency (from my point of view) and giving to Perry Roland all my admiration for the excellent work: -Talking strictly about the notes; the convention approved is focusing to "draw" music, but it is not giving it a meaning to the position where each note is, what I try to say is, a NATURAL on "Fa" has NOT the same value (meaning) on "La". Thinking a little bit how to improve it, is asigning caracters for position (similar to superscripts and subscripts) in order to have a unique graphic representation, but with meaning (determined by the position on the block). _ | |___| |__@_ ___@_ Why the improvement?: To be able to store music (not symbols) in a condensed format into electronic media, so the players will "talk" what is written in "muscial language" (like some software do speaking phrases in some languages). Thanks for your time and attention, Erik Garrés Hello, I think Mr. Garres means the western musical notation invented in the 1200s, which is very widely, if not universally, used today. Unicode 3.0 actually already has at least 2 older forms of musical notation in the main Hebrew block and somewhere in the Arabic block---they are signs for chanting liturgically. These symbols are at least 1100 years old. Elaine Keown "Erik Garrés" wrote: I would like to know, why the symbols used for music are not listed on UNICODE ? _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: What about musical notation ?
On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, Erik Garrs wrote: First of all, excuse my English. I would like to know, why the symbols used for music are not listed on UNICODE ? Because music is the world-wide manner of communication and expression. Does anybody agree ? I would like to know what you think ! They have been accepted for inclusion in a future version: see http://www.unicode.org/unicode/alloc/Pipeline.html. -- Daniel Biddle [EMAIL PROTECTED]
