| John Chambers wrote:
| > ... And if I casually ignore the existence of clefs
| >and other orthogonal concepts, maybe the discussion won't wander off
| >into discussions of how transposition should work. ;-)
|
| We've done that and we have a solution which Laurie and I have both
| implemented. It also solves the problem of abc2ps's non-standard
| use of clefs other than the treble. Since this also goes in the K:
| field, why not add the clef, middle, playtransposed and capo definitions
| here while we're at it.
Hey, I was trying to avoid this!
Actually, it might be reasonable to put this topic off for now. It
might be a good idea to have a separate section of a standard that
deals with clefs. The reason is that, as Chris seems to have (perhaps
unintentionally) noticed in the original abc, for most purposes we
don't need to deal with clefs at all. Not only is abc2ps's handling
non-standard, but all others are, since abc's current standards don't
have clefs. Neither does midi, for similar reasons.
Clefs are an artifact of printed staff notation, and the only reason
you'd want them mentioned in abc is that you want them printed when
you produce staff notation. It's for this reason that I'd suggest
that abc2ps's usage is closer to "standard". The only standard for
clefs is what is used in staff notation, and it's pretty clear there
that the three standard clefs imply an octave. Your and Laurie's
version treats them as treble clefs shifted by a half or full line,
but with treble pitch. To get the correct pitch requires commas, the
equivalent of leger lines. This isn't correct, and would just be
confusing to users, as well as a pain in the arse to type. Not that
it matters all that much, but user friendliness would say that if we
deal with clefs at all, we should make them behave as much like
standard staff notation clefs as possible.
But history so far has shown that we really don't need them all that
much. So a separate codicil (perhaps suggesting them as an optional
qualifier on both K: and V: lines) might be the way to go.
So how about a separate "Subject: clefs" thread?
| I still think the tonic field should be mandatory, for reasons which
| I have stated many times before. We do not need to do away with
| global accidentals, since it can be a local option for programs to
| treat them either way.
Several people have mentioned the one real problem with this: There
is a lot of abc out there that simply gets the tonic wrong, because
the transcriber doesn't understand keys. This is worse than having no
tonic at all. The main use of a tonic is for lookups, and it would be
better to have nothing there than to have an incorrect tonic.
Making K:<accidentals> by itself legal would simplify the work of
people just trying to transcribe music and preserve the information
on the printed page. Staff notation gives only the signature, not the
key, so requiring the tonic means asking the transcriber to add
information that wasn't there. Some people can't get this right.
Personally, I'm a bit annoyed by this, too. Tonic+mode was a minor
improvement of abc over staff notation. But experience does show that
a fair number of musicians can't get it right. I've been amused and
at times annoyed by incorrect K: lines that merely get the signature
right. Stating the tonic should be encouraged, but I don't think it
should be required.
In any case, as with the X: line, we'll likely find that once
explicit key signatures are widely usable, a lot of people will
casually omit the tonic no matter what we say. So it'll be a choice
of handling the K: lines that lack a tonic or complaining but
accepting them. I'd rather take the more friendly approach of
silently accepting them. And my code already does this.
(I've also written a bunch of code that accepts abc without X: lines.
Legal, shmegal; some users just can't be bothered. I'd rather the
computer handle it than do yet more hand-editing. Computers are good
at that sort of thing. Though it is a Small Matter Of Programming.)
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