No, Frank. KISS means Keep It Simple. Actually it's a well known
engineering maxim - the full version is "Keep It Simple, Stupid!", and it is
very good advice for programmers! Actually I don't want to call people here
stupid. They're not. Einstein said "Everything should be made as simple as
possible, but no simpler". That applies too.
The problem I see is that music is so diverse that there is no way that we
can allow everything to be written in the most natural way for each style
and at the same time have a hope in hell's chance of providing software
support for it all.
I *thought* that an extension mechanism might be the answer. Perhaps my
mistake was to underestimate the number of chords that jazz guitarists use.
If it requires 40,000 "standard" chords to be written out as extensions or,
alternatively, a different 20 chords to be written out for each and every
tune, then that's a problem and I can see why you'd want an algorithm
instead.
I failed to understand what may well have been a systematic naming
convention used by Frank. (The chord names appeared to include A6, Am-6,
Am6, A69, A7, A7+, Amaj7, Am7, Adim7, A9, A-9, A9-5, A11, A+11, Am13,
Ammaj13+11, A13-9). It looked complicated.
For instance, is A9-5 a ninth with a missing fifth or a 9th with a flattened
fifth?
Is A7+ a sharpened 7th - but then what's Amaj7?
Or is it A with a 7th added - but then what's A7?
A7+ appears to use postfix notation, A+11 appears to use prefix notation.
Do prefix and postfix +s mean different things? Or is that an A# chord? Or
is A+11 a chord of A with an augmented 5th and an 11th?
I'm afraid I haven't the faintest idea what most of it means - and it looks
complicated - and Richard Walker's recent mail doesn't explain much of it
(in fact only the bit I already knew) - so I wanted to give the *user* the
chance to define the notation rather than build it into the language and
therefore have to rely on whatever bits we had built in, and have a tough
time wherever we'd missed something.
"Rocky's formal grammar" (yes, I know Rocky was only the one who had to
watch) was an attempt to go the other way. Does Frank support that
approach? Do others?
I am actually trying to find a way to INCLUDE many styles. If we wanted
single style only then we wouldn't need to bother with either the extension
mechanism or any fancy grammar!
Laurie
P.S. Apologies for my previous post appearing twice. Mailer glitch on this
end.
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