On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Buddha Buck wrote: > So you would agree with the following text
[snipped] Yes. > >See the section on beaming... Beaming is meaningless outside > >of staff notation. > > I disagree. Beaming is used in staff notation to indicate musical > rhythm. In the face of M:, beaming may be redundant, but it is a > useful redundancy to performers. The description of the > beam-equivalent notation in ABC may refer to beaming, but the concept > of rhythmic grouping of notes is not staff notation-specific. You are confusing the result with the way that it is communicated. That's like saying that the letter S is not alphabet-specific because the *sound* that it makes is not alphabet-specific. Rhythmic grouping of notes is not specific to any notation system, but communicating it with beams is. Furthermore, the ABC standard does not define beams in terms of how they group notes together rhythmically. It defines beams in terms of how the notes will be drawn on the staff. So really, it's less like defining something as "the sound that the letter S makes" and more like defining it as "the letter S itself." > >So, I would counter your suggestion by saying that if you want to write > >stand-alone notation, irrespective of how it would appear on the staff, > >maybe *you* are the one who shouldn't be using abc. > > This seems a little extreme. Keep in mind that it was in response to: "if you *do* expect the staff to look in a certain way: don't use abc - use a music typesetting program or whatever." If what I said was extreme, this was equally so. John To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
