John Chambers a skrivas:
> Jean-Francois Moine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> skrivis:
> | - there are a limited number of clefs (treble, alto and bass), and
> | AFAIK there are only 7 usual clefs. The clefs are named by their root
> | note (G for treble, C for alto and F for bass), and by their line
> | number (lines are numbered 1 for the lowest, and 5 for the highest).
> | The 7 clefs are (from highest to lowest):
> | G(2) - C1 - C2 - C(3) - C4 - F3 - F(4)
> | - so, a generalized clef indication could be:
> |
> | clef=<clef_type_and_pitch><line_number>
[snip]
> Simple, perhaps, but this would probably lead to a lot of confusion
> among musicians. It is based on the idea that clefs are doing some
> sort of transposition, but few musicians will be able to make much
> sense of this. People who use alto and bass clef rarely if ever
> consider them any sort of transposition.
[snip]
> Transposition refers to a situation where, if you finger a G on your
> instrument, F or _B comes out. If you finger a G and a G (or g) comes
> out, this is not transposition. Similarly, saying that "clef=f" or
> "clef=F," does some sort of transposition makes very little sense,
> and doesn't help me know how I should type the ABC.
I was not thinking about transposition, but only about how the notes
are written in ABC. There are 2 schools: the first one says "when I
see 'clef=bass', I don't change the indicated note pitch" (abcmidi),
the other one says "when I see 'clef=bass', the pitch is 2 octaves
lower" (a "c" is converted to the absolute 'C,'). It's only pitch
interpretation for both printing and (standard) MIDI playing.
About transposition, when some instrument implies it, the player
usually knows this transposition, and (s)he does not play the notes as
they are written, but better plays the right note the instrument gives.
> It would be better to adopt notation that says unambiguously how the
> clef and ABC notes are to map to the staff. Possibly the simplest and
> least confusing scheme was mentioned by someone (who was it?) a few
> months ago: Give a clef=<name> and also a middle=<note> clause if you
> want to be precise. The clef name could be one of the three letters
> CFG, or one of the three common English names. (Maybe we should
> include the Italian names, too?)
(I'm living in latin Europe, but I don't like it: such parsing is time
and space consuming while most of the users don't know about the exact
ABC syntax)
> With this scheme, some common clefs might be:
>
> clef=G middle=B (standard treble clef)
> clef=G middle=d (French violin clef)
> clef=C middle=c (alto clef, abc(m)2ps version)
[snip]
Hey, stop there! What about:
clef=G middle=C
clef=C middle=d
That's meaningless.
> You could also use clef=treble, clef=alto or clef=bass, of course. An
> interesting case would be a double (piano) staff described as:
>
> V:1 clef=treble middle=b
> V:2 clef=bass middle=D
I don't like clef definition in voices: the real clefs should only be
indicated for staves. Better use K: if you want to change the pitches
of a voice.
> This would be reasonable for piano music, since all notes on either
> staff would need at most one comma or apostrophe. Note that this
> doesn't agree with anyone's idea of the "right" default for treble or
> bass clef. But your typical pianist would like it.
A typical pianic may be, but not an organ player: (s)he knows only
about voices, and each one may go from the top treble to the bottom bass,
on any staff (a voice may span many staves), and (s)he, as a ABC writer,
does not want to change the octave pitch each time (s)he'd like to *see*
any specific clef on the printed score.
> This notation would make it easy to correct ABC that was written for
> a different program than the one you're using. Rather than
> laboriously changing all the commas in a bass line, you could just
> insert a "middle=d "or "middle=D," clause in one line (K: or V:) in
> the header, and it would come out looking good.
That is just what I proposed: 'clef=G' or 'clef=g'. May be I did not
explain it with clear words?
> This could be useful even for people who only use treble clef. It's
> common to see tunes written out in a range that is in the middle of a
> flute or violin's range, which is an octave high for most human
> voices. You could add "middle=b" to the tune and get it printed an
> octave lower, where vocalists are used to reading. Similarly, you
[snip]
There is a musical notation for that: have a dash line above the staff
starting with '8'. In my proposal, this could be done, including the
computer to do it by itself...
[snip]
> you map an arbitrary line to an arbitrary note. That would certainly
> be a possibility, but the question was "Who can do simpler?")
When you suggest 'middle=bla', I'd say it's not simpler at all: it asks
for more syntax parsing, and more coherence checking, and it does not
offer more than what I did.
--
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