Jack Campin wrote:
> Best of all would be to allow these modes to be defined, on both
> a per-tune and per-file basis:
>
> K:Montgomerie A Mix =G ^g
> ...
> K:E Montgomerie % the original pipe is in fact in E though
> % nobody would notate for it that way
>
> And yes, this *is* a slippery slope sneakily intended to lead to support
> for microtonal modes...
I wrote the highland bagpipe abc2ps variant so that specifying K:HP would
blank out the key signature among other things. On the actual bagpipe
the pitches are typically 135 cents above what's written (relative to A440)
and c, g, and G are actually closer to ^c, ^g, and =G. I say "closer"
because the bagpipe scale is not equally tempered. I've thought about
modifying abc2midi (but haven't had the time to do it) so that it would
generate midi with the pitches adjusted to the correct frequency.
The easiest way to implement the bagpipe scale would be to hard-code
the software to do what I want when K:HP is specified (that's what
I did with abcb2ps). It would be more flexible to soft-code it so
that the pitch adjustments can be specified with %% style pseudo-comments
or with a .fmt file, and invoked with a K: command.
That is workable for highland bagpipe which uses an approximate
subset of the equal tempered 12-tone chromatic scale. I'm not
quite sure how you could handle non-12-tone scales (especially
since I'm not familiar with explicitly micro-tonal music). I'm
sure to be flamed for saying this, but I think that ABC is too
strongly tied to the western 12-tone scale to bother trying to
accomodate micro-tonal music. I believe that if we were to try,
then the resulting "MT-ABC" would be too hard/cumbersome to
use. I think trying to notate mictrotonal music in the 12-tone
system is like trying to use metric wrenches on non-metric nuts
(you can make it work, sort of, but you usually bruise some
knuckles is the process). On the other hand, I WOULD like a
mechanism for notating some of the small pitch variations I hear
in Irish fiddle music.
Eric Mrozek
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