> Another thing that already has precedent in abc is a staff with other > than 5 lines. Someone (I wonder who ;-) has already implemented the > medieval 4-line staff. This could be generalized easily within abc, > by something like "clef=perc lines=2". The "lines=" clause would be > generally useful for a number of other kinds of notation. If we > combine this with the "middle=" clause that maps abc's letter notes > to the staff, we have a quite general way of defining the displayed > staff and where to draw the notes. (For even-lined staffs, the middle > note would be mapped to the middle space, of course.)
But that doesn't give you any natural way to represent the up/down stemming convention. In percussion music that's orthogonal to which line the notehead goes on. You *could* do it by having explicit stem-direction signs, but that would be so noisy as to make a typical snare drum score all but impossible to read or edit in source form. > If we add to this a set of modifiers saying how to draw note heads, > we'd have a general notation that could represent all sorts of music > notation. The point of ABC is to notate music, not music notation. > We might want to get together a list of kinds of note > heads, and give them !...! symbols. And what use would that be without a list of the noteheads themselves, defined as graphical objects of some kind that programs could import? It would be even less use without a mapping to performance instructions. Not all percussion music does this in the same way. Some people prefer to use ordinary noteheads with funny accent signs. Semantically it doesn't matter, and it's just making ABC less widely usable to force a graphical house style on all staff-notation representations of the same musical information. The idea behind the scheme I originally proposed is that it abstracts away almost all the instrument-specific details; the music I mostly had in mind didn't need them. You have a very few "logical" instruments (maybe different skins of the same drum, or the same skin hit in two different ways) and you say which hand/stick hits it when. End of story. That covers everything needed for most percussion genres on the planet, be it a Highland pipe band, a symphony orchestra or a gamelan. Requires no hard-to-port graphical elements and no hard-to-define semantics. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
