=?iso-8859-1?q?Forgeot=20Eric?= writes: | John, your repeat with colons is a clever idea. |:: ... ::| ,
This isn't my notation; it's the obvious abc equivalent of what's common notation in some musical circles. I've found that even musicians who say they've never seen it always guess right when asked when it means. It's an elegant way to say "three times", and rather trivial to implement. | |::: ... |1,3 ... :|2,4 ... :| etc. This is also not unusual in some kinds of music. In this case, the extra colons are somewhat redundant. The reason for using them is to get that redundancy. Musicians often have trouble reading repeat notation, and getting repeats right can take a lot of rehearsal time. In sight-reading situations, repeats are often the cause of disasters that require stopping, discussing, and starting over. This sort of notation has been discovered (probably independently by a number of people) as a way to get across very clearly what is intended. It also tends to make the start-of-repeat highly visible, something valuable when you have half a beat to go back to that point. This would be considered "full" repeat notation, of course, and any standard would have to allow omission of the redundant colons. But software should be required to accept this notation. Currently most abc software will choke on this. | Ans so is the one with the ending bracket | |: ... | ... |[1 ... ]:|[2 ... | ... ]| This isn't too important, but it does solve the problem of getting ending brackets right when endings are different lengths. This is something that will get a reaction "I've never heard of such a thing" from some people, while others will say "Oh, yeah; I do that all the time, and current abc gives ugly printed endings." And it answers the aesthetic objection to unbalanced brackets in the current abc definition. Of course, all those brackets can be omitted in common circumstances, so most abc will continue to have unbalanced brackets. But if this bothers you, this syntax would let you go in and add the missing brackets, and the result will be legal. | This should be added in the abc standard. I'm only an user (I only | write tunes, not software) here, but I've heard that there would | be a sort of vote from all the abcusers in order to decide what is | (maybe) the best to add in the standard. | After that, programmers can decide if they want to implement this | in their program. Of course, there's a very real fear that once something gets into a standard, there will be social pressure to implement it. ;-) | >> The following works perfectly well with ABC2Win: | >> CEC DED |1-3 EGE FAF :|2,4 EFG FED :|"last time" EFG ABc| That example actually had a minor typo. It should really have been |: CEC DED |1,3 EGE FAF :|2,4 EFG FED :|"last time" EFG ABc |] The typo was the '-', not the apparent fifth time. In every case like this that I know of in printed music, the "last time" ending is always intended to replace the "other last" ending, i.e., it replaces ending 4. So the intended play order here is: | CEC DED | EGE FAF | % Ending 1 | CEC DED | EFG FED | % Ending 2 | CEC DED | EGE FAF | % Ending 3 | CEC DED | EFG FED | % Ending 4 ... play that N times, then ... | CEC DED | EGE FAF | % Ending 1 | CEC DED | EFG FED | % Ending 2 | CEC DED | EGE FAF | % Ending 3 | CEC DED | EFG ABc | % Ending "last time" The musical environment is various sorts of dancing, where you play the tune some number of times, trading leads, making up variations, and so on, and then the last time through there's some special final flashy ending. Conventional notation doesn't really have an elegant way of notatiing such things. There's no standard notation for "Play it as many times as you think appropriate for the setting" and we have to resort to natural-language instructions if we notate it at all. This |"last time" ... | notation is an example. On the other hand, I'd bet that Jack Campin already has examples of tunes where |: ... |[1-3 ... ]:|[2,4 ... :| is reasonable, and both endings are played the second time through. I'll have to see if I can spot such a piece of music. The algorithm for implementing the playback is straightforward. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
