Laurie wrote:
>Mike Whitaker said:
>> ...we have three choices:
>>
>> 1) don't
>> 2) pick one and stick with it...
>> 3) allow chord 'dialects'...
>
>I would vote heavily for 2
>
>Option 1 obviously means chaos. Option 3 means chaos too.
>As an implementer I just don't see myself supporting multiple different and
>incompatible dialects. Writing the code would be OK - just have a pile of
>tables. Supporting it and answering the questions from completely confused
>customers would be a nightmare.
I agree wholeheartedly.
>There is in fact a high degree of consensus regarding all the simpler
>chords. I really wish that Frank Nordberg hadn't shot himself in the foot.
>(Frank - what you did was to give an example of a whole load of notation
>with no explanation. I simply have no idea what most of the chords you
>named are. I have no idea whether what you described was systematic or
>chaotic, whether you mixed multiple 'dialects' or just one, and so on.
>there was therefore no way that I could follow your lead. So we went of in
>various other directions).
>
The main ambiguity seems to lie with the use of + and - symbols. "+"
can mean augmented, sharpened or added, and there's really no way a
program can determine which is correct. Even human readers have to be
expert musicians and familiar with the harmony rules for this particular
genre of music to interpret this correctly. I suggest, therefore, that
we eliminate + and - from the standard and admit only the explicit
namings, aug, #, add, dim, b and whatever we decide should mean "omit
this note".
Phil Taylor
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