I have scanned through the list of musical terms in my favourite music textbook and have the following terms to indicate tempo:
Adagio - At a leisurely pace. Allegretto - Fast but not as fast as allegro Allegro - Lively Larghetto - Slow, but not as slow as largo Largo - Slow Lento - Slow Prestissimo - As quick as possible Presto - Quick Veloce - Quick Andante - At a moderate, walking pace. Andantino - Usually quicker than Andante, but sometimes slower I do not know whether Largo/Lento and Presto/Veloce are equivalent pairs or not. There were also some German terms given which were a small subset of the Italian ones. There are also terms that indicate a playing style which imply a tempo (I presume), some examples: Con Fuoco - with fire Con Spirito - with spirit Con Anima - with life I think that mapping these words directly to speeds might be difficult to do automatically and for some of them, it might be other things as well as tempo that get set. Though I am loth to add yet more proposals to this thread, my current thinking really boils down to 2 suggestions: 1. Musical terms would be better put in a new field (I think q: has been suggested) than added to the existing Q: field. Possibly N: would be acceptable. 2. Where the transcriber has chosen a specific tempo for a tune that did not appear in the original, this can be marked with a comment e.g. Q:1/4=60 %not-original The idea here is that a printer program might choose to suppress detail that was not in the original manuscript (either automatically or when the user sets a flag to do this). This gives us a way out of the notation-to-print/notation-to-play forking. James Allwright To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
