This thread keeps going on, but I have the feeling that there has
been agreement for some time, and we've just forgotten it. But I've often
been wrong on that score before...
Here's what I think has been said: ties and slurs can't always be
distinguished in printed staff notation. The usual convention is that if
there is an ambiguity between tie and slur, one always assumes it's a tie;
in other words, in questions of tie/slur, the default is a tie.
There is no ambiguity in abc---the example ^f- | f has a tie, not
a slur---so that the second f has to be an f sharp. Which means that
playback and midi programs should play ^f, but printing programs don't
print the accidental (because they don't need to--the convention takes
care of it.)
It would seem to follow---but I don't remember if there was
agreement here---that if one wrote ^f- | ^f that the accidental on the
second f is there for emphasis, and a printing program should print it;
but it should be equivalent to ^f- | f for any midi or playback program,
or for that matter, to a musician reading the tune.
Another question was lightly touched on, but not resolved: if we
add another f to the examples: ^f-| f f and ^f- | ^f f ...what should be
done with the third f? I would think that in the first example, it's an f
natural, in the second, it's an f sharp (since the printing program will
have explicitly sharped the first f in the measure, so by extension, all
later f's will be sharped.) But I'm guessing---we should just follow
whatever the actual convention is in printed music for this.
John Chambers brought up the question of having software accept
abc's tie notation for a slur. It seems relatively harmless to me, as
long as it doesn't prevent people from using the tie/slur distinction the
way it's meant to be, but it points out the need for clear
documentation--it's easy to imagine someone using a tie for a slur and
then having no clue as to why some strange accidentals showed up later on
in the measure.
Cheers,
John Walsh
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
