Bryan Creer writes: | Aaron Newman wrote - | | >The modes-as-key-signatures are part of the 1.6 standard, maybe what you're | >saying is that this originally popped up as part of a tool and was | incorporated into the standard out of necessity. ... | | Just what I've been saying for some time but my suggestion that we introduce | an explicit key signature form of K: was met with considerable opposition. | Curiously, when John Chambers went ahead and did it, nobody complained at | all.
My perspective was that it wasn't so much "opposition" as it was "Who the hell needs it?" There were lots of positive reactions from people who saw a personal use for it. The opposition was essentially from people who didn't need it and didn't see why abc should be cluttered up with things that only other people need. This is, of course, completely standard human behavior. To summarize for newcomers, what I implemented in my jcbc2ps clone is a slightly extended K line of the form K:<tonic><mode><sig> where <tonic> and <mode> are as in abc 1.6, and the <sig> is a list of the accidentals. It turns out there's a good reason to say that the <mode> defaults to "major" only if both <mode> and <sig> are missing. For example: K: Amix=g % Scottish "pipe" scale with advisory =g in sig K: Dphr^F % D hejaz/freygish K: D^f_B_e % Same, with sig drawn differently K: ^f^c % D/Bm for people who can't tell the difference My motive originally was to be able to get the musically correct key signatures for the Balkan and Middle-Eastern music that I play. Some others pointed out other situations where this is useful. One is in transcribing music, when the transcribers may not be expert enough to get the tonic and mode right. Some people thought it was better to just transcribe the key signature than to guess wrong about the tonic and mode. The first example above shows yet another use: You see such unnecessary naturals in some music to correct for the problem that some musicians quickly realize that the tune is in A, and "correct" the key signature to A major because they know that's what it should have been. Putting the natural in the key sig tells them that it's not a typo and the key isn't A major. This is similar to the use of unnecessary "advisory" accidentals before notes for readability. The abc 1.6 (semi)standard does describe something like this syntax, of course, but describes it as meaning that the explicit accidentals should be applied to all the notes in the music. This turns out to be not very useful, and my tune finder's search bot was unable to find any instances of it in the hundred thousand or so abc tunes on the web. There is one potential use: In making music instruction texts, it could be handy to use a single abc source file and have it drawn several ways, with the key sig accidentals either at the left end of every staff or spread out through the music. So I'd encourage implementers to consider a flag that controls this. It might not be used much, but people writing music texts will thank you. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
