Laurie writes:
| John Chambers wrote
| "...As you may recall, the approach that I used for my Klez/Balkan
| tunes is the rather trivial extension of K: to allow:
| K:<tonic><mode><accidentals>
| ..."
|
| I think it's reasonable. It's a pain for me to implement in Muse
| because in a lot of places I carry the keysig as an integer, so
| there's a deal of rewriting (and of course it affects the layout
| engine and the player and the file format and menus and
| dialogs and Ctrl-arrow editing and I'd need to think about
| MIDI input too).
Yeah; that's what I had to do with abc2ps. With only the Western
classical modes, you can characterize the key signature with just one
integer (with the sign indicating sharps or flats). If you want to
allow non-classical key signatures, you can't get away with this, so
you have to have an explicit list of accidentals in addition to the
count. I just hunted down all of abc2ps's uses of the keysig
accidental counter and added code to deal with a small array of note
values that represent the accidentals. It didn't take that long. The
tricky part was figuring out why a keysig change didn't always take
effect where the ABC said it should. This turned out to be a case of
some, uh, "interesting" coding tricks involving local and global
variables.
| There are a few middle eastern tunes that I've started playing
| which need a key signature of two sharps and a flat. I find it
| offensive to see them written as just two sharps, so maybe...
It does seem that, now that the publishing industry has found the
"klezmer revival" a source of income, they are all now changing over
from classical to klezmer key signatures. It might have been amusing
to hear some of the behind-the-scenes debates that led to this. There
was probably a major effort at education required to get them to go
along with such things.
One of the interesting facets of the Internetization of the world is
that things are now global that used to be local. It was feasible for
music publishers to remain blissfully unaware of anything but Western
music, because there were a lot of publishers that could all do their
own thing, and musicians could go to a publisher that was
accommodating. Now we're doing this ABC thing out in the open, for
all the world to see. It's going to be a lot more difficult to
partition the world's music up into little enclaves, each with its
own notation. This will continue to put pressure on us software types
to produce software that works for all the weird music Out There. As
a long-time "world music" sort of person, I like this, but it is
going to take a bunch of education of the sort that we're seeing
here, before it all works well.
In any case, there are a lot of coding shortcuts that work when you
restrict yourself to a narrow set of music, but which won't work for
the general case. We'll have to face this, or see ABC split up into
enclaves of software for different musical styles.
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