Bryan Creer wrote: | Wendy wrote - | >It would have been great if the original standard had had separate | >fields for key signature and tonic, so that the tonic could be specified | >by itself and the key signature expressed in pure sharps and flats, like | >the extension in John Chambers' jcabc2ps allows. It would have been more | >flexible in allowing users to insert the information needed - and to | >leave out that which is *not* needed - by their respective traditions. | >But I think Bryan is right about it being too late; there is no way to | >change it now without breaking a large number of abc tunes already in | >circulation. | | ... It was already too late to change when I first mentioned it. | I was only using it as an example of how things could go wrong if developers | felt free to intoduce their own innovations without thinking through the | consequences or discussing them with the rest of the abc community first. | Once something has gone into use, you can't get rid of it. | | In this case, the situation could be improved a little by the general | adoption of John Chambers' explicit key proposal.
I'd sorta agree that Wendy's suggestion would have been useful. But it wasn't what happened. And there are good arguments in favor of the current tonic+mode scheme, at least in the traditions where it works. But one of the real problems with the tonic+mode is that there's a lot of abc out there that simply has it wrong. This might not have mattered much if were were working with a print-only music format. But one of the real advantages of abc is that it's easy for software to parse, so we can write lots of software that understands it. Things like searching for tunes in a particular key are feasible with abc. But this is shot down when people get the K line wrong. This is one of the arguments that has been given in favor of pure key signatures. There are a number of projects underway to transcribe historic music to abc. Very often the transcribers don't stand a chance of getting the tonic or the mode right. The people running the project will make the reasonable rule that if the key isn't obvious, just type the major key that gives the same signature. In such cases, it would be better if the transcriber could type only the signature. This is less useful for searches, but it doesn't lead to "false positives" like the wrong key does. It would be nice if transcribers could get it right, but this isn't realistic. In reality we have lots of abc around whose K line just gives the relative major key, or sometimes the wrong minor key. There's not a lot we can do to fix this, because a lot of musicians simply will never get it right. And we've heard from a few whose attitude is "Why should I bother? If it gives the right sharps or flat, that's all I care about." No amount of lecturing is likely to change this attitude. It could be worse. There are a number of tunes that are played in both major and minor. I've seen several cases where one of them was written with a major key signature and then accidentals written throughout to put it into minor. One can get a certain perverse thrill from seeing something so idiotic actually make it into print. It imparts a healthy disrespect for the publishing industry. I haven't seen this in abc yet. But I won't be surprised when I do. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
