OK, but one question is: Suppose a program sees: M:2/4 Q:1/4=120 ... M:6/8 Q:3/8
With just this information, should the second be displayed as a dotted eighths note, or as <quarter> = <dotted eighths>? This might not have been at all what was intended. The intent could have been to switch to 6/8 but not specify a tempo. I can see this leading to a lot of confusion and wildly different implementations. This is personally mostly an "intellectual interest" point; I don't really see myself using this much, since I rarely feed ABC to players. But this could easily lead to bad ABC on my part. If I were transcribing some printed music and saw a tempo indication such as 1/4=3/8 (as notes of course), I'd probably do my best to translate this to a Q line. But I'd probably get it wrong, since I wouldn't be a regular user of this feature. This is similar to all the extant ABC that has wildly incorrect tempos in the current notation. In any case, I'd prefer that the software just do what I type, and not try to outsmart me. If I write Q:1/4=3/8, I'd hope the obvious two notes and '=' would be displayed. If I write only Q:3/8, I'd hope that only a dotted eighths note would be displayed, despite its obvious lack of meaning to me and most other musicians. It does occur to me that if the software will just blindly put out the contents of the Q line with fractions converted to notes, it would work to notate the conventional Balkan rhythm notations: Q: 4/8 3/8 4/8=70 Let's see if it works with abc2ps ... ... Nope. But I spent about 20 minutes looking at the write_tempo() routine, and I figured out why it failed. It was just a missing test of the return value of sscanf(). It's fixed now, and looks real pretty. Since my clone (jcabc2ps) is what my Tune Finder uses, I can now use this notation on the Web and Balkan musicians will get the notation that they expect. I think I'll now go off and add this to all the irregular tunes in my .../Intl/ directory. Any other Balkan musicians out there who think this would be a useful thing to somehow get into the ABC standard? Or maybe we should just say "Hey, it's not a violation of the current standard; it's just an undocumented case which obviously oughta work. It is standard music notation, after all." (I'm glad you encouraged me to look into this. ;-) Laurie writes: | This is back to the question of "does the notation tell the program what to | print or does it describe the music". The answer is that it describes the | music and software can figure out how to express that in any other medium | (for instance sound waves, MIDI codes or tadpoles on 5 bar gates). I | *suggest* that a good thing to print for this case would be | <note shape denoting old beat> = <note shape denoting new beat> | ... I wrote: | To get it treated as anything other than a mistake, you'd have to say | Q:1/2=3/2 and the displayed/printed output would have to show the two | notes with the '=' in between. (And I suppose we should also state in | the spec that the first length is the old beat and the second is the | new, or half the people writing abc players would do it the other way | 'round. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
