On 2 Nov 2001, Laura Conrad wrote:
> But in most of the music I work with, X is used for both a sharp and a
> natural on a note which would otherwise be flatted. So my guess is
> that you don't really have to "transpose" the sharps in the figures to
> naturals, either. Someone who knows more than I do about the history
> of baroque notation may want to correct this guess.
Most of the figured bass I have seen has used sharps, flats, and naturals.
But I believe those were mostly modern editions. It would be nice if abc
could handle both, though I suppose it could be left up to the software.
> I don't think allowing naturals to be entered as part of chord syntax
> is a kludge. I think it's an obvious extension of the functionality,
> which may well be useful to some people who write more normal chords,
> too.
I should have stated my assumptions better. If naturals are needed to
represent some real-world chord, then that's fine. But in principle, I
don't think a feature should be added to the chord syntax that would
extend its use beyond writing chords. It is already being used for too
many things... expressions, dynamics, and essentially any other type of
text, even though its stated purpose in the 1.6 standard is "Guitar
Chords".
On the one hand, it's nice to have that kind of flexibility, so that you
*can* kludge things like figured bass into abc. But it often results in
conflicts (above- vs. below-the-staff placement), unexpected behavior
("Andante" becoming "Bbndante" after transposition), and confusion to the
user who might assume that "4\n2" is supposed to be some kind of guitar
chord. Ideally (and perhaps idealistically), it would be better for each
distinct feature to have its own distinct syntax.
> I agree that if there were ever a community of users and developers
> who were using ABC to do figured bass, there should be extensions for
> that purpose added to the standard. My attempts have involved a fair
> number of kludges. I don't see such a community now.
I was speaking from an ideal-world standpoint. Personally, I would like
to see a standard based primarily on a representative sampling of musical
literature, as far as that is possible. A measurable goal could be stated
as the ability to codify X% of the samples accurately and completely.
Leave it up to the developers to decide whether or not there is a large
enough audience for a particular feature; if it is common enough in
musical literature (and I think figured bass probably is), it should at
least be in the standard. Again, from an ideal-world standpoint.
John
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