One of those other Johns wrote: | On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, James Allwright wrote: | | > It would also be nice to find a written standard to support the | > interpreation, since the only definition I can find says nothing about | > ties and so implies that the accidental is necessary. | | I just took a look at the draft standard, and it doesn't appear to say | anything about accidentals remaining in effect until the end of the bar, | either. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place.
No, for a straightforward reason. The 1.6 "standard" that it was based on was written by Chris Walshaw, who was mostly working on abc2mtex. This is a pure music formatter, and as such, it has no concern with the pitch of any note. His doc wasn't intended as a standard at all; it was simply a readable description of abc for abcmtex users. As such, there was no need to discuss things that don't appear on paper, such as pitches. Those were questions for the readers of the music. The only reason such things are a concern is that people have also written programs that "play" music by converting it to various audio formats. For such programs, questions of pitch are a very serious issue. The best way to handle them is to discuss the topic in the way it has always been discussed: How should a musician interpret such notation? The software should obviously do it the same way. And, of course, over the centuries there have been so many different musical styles with so many different rules, that the only really useful answers to such questions all start with "Well, it depends ..." To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
