> On 28 May 2018, at 03:39, Garth Wallace <gwa...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 3:36 PM, Hans Åberg <haber...@telia.com> wrote: >> The flats and sharps of Arabic music are semantically the same as in Western >> music, departing from Pythagorean tuning, then, but the microtonal >> accidentals are different: they simply reused some that were available. >> > But they aren't different! They are the same symbols. They are, as you > yourself say, reused.
Historically, yes, but not necessarily now. > The fact that they do not denote the same width in cents in Arabic music as > they do in Western modern classical does not matter. That sort of precision > is not inherent to the written symbols. It is not about precision, but concepts. Like B, Β, and В, which could have been unified, but are not. > By contrast, Persian music notation invented new microtonal accidentals, > called the koron and sori, and my impression is that their average value, as > measured by Hormoz Farhat in his thesis, is also usable in Arabic music. For > comparison, I have posted the Arabic maqam in Helmholtz-Ellis notation [1] > using this value; note that one actually needs two extra microtonal > accidentals—Arabic microtonal notation is in fact not complete. > > The E24 exact quarter-tones are suitable for making a piano sound badly out > of tune. Compare that with the accordion in [2], Farid El Atrache - > "Noura-Noura". > > 1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2016-02/msg00607.html > 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvp6fo7tfpk > > > > I don't really see how this is relevant. Nobody is claiming that the koron > and sori accidentals are the same symbols as the Arabic half-sharp and flat > with crossbar. They look entirely different. Arabic music simply happens to use Western style accidentals for concepts similar to Persian music rather than Western music.
