Frank Nordberg wrote:
>I've just translated a Beethoven piece into ABC, and ran into a strange
>problem.
<snip>
>Now, I've always heard quintuplet defined as "five notes in the place of
>four", but it seems strange that three independently developed ABC
>applications can have exactly the same bug. So, is there any tradition
>anywhere for the "five notes in the place of two" definition of quintuplets?
>From the abc v1.6 standard:
Duplets, triplets, quadruplets, etc.
====================================
These can be simply coded with the notation (2ab for a duplet,
(3abc for a triplet or (4abcd for a quadruplet, etc., up to (9.
The musical meanings are:
(2 2 notes in the time of 3
(3 3 notes in the time of 2
(4 4 notes in the time of 3
(5 5 notes in the time of n
(6 6 notes in the time of 2
(7 7 notes in the time of n
(8 8 notes in the time of 3
(9 9 notes in the time of n
If the time signature is compound (3/8, 6/8, 9/8, 3/4, etc.) then
n is three, otherwise n is two.
-------------------------------------------------
So in 2/4 time five notes in the time of two is correct, at least in terms of
the standard. Whether the standard is correct is another matter (apparently
musical authorities disagree on this).
The way around it is to take advantage of the extended tuplet notation described
in the next section of the standard, and write:
(5:4:4
meaning five notes in the time of four for the next four notes, which is what
you want.
Phil Taylor
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
