We've been here many times before, so I've restrained myself from going over the same ground again, but perhaps I should make clear once more my objections to this suggestion for the benefit of those who weren't around earlier.
In order to describe a piece of music completely, you need to know any two of the tonic, mode and key signature. Knowing any two of these makes it quite trivial to determine the other if you need it. Conventional musical notation gives only the key signature, which is inadequate, and has led to the practice in classical music of including the tonic in the title of the piece. abc is much better in this respect, since it uses tonic+mode. This is somewhat unfamiliar to abc beginners, and has led to some incorrect K: fields in tunes on the net, where the transcriber has chosen any old tonic+mode combination which happens to give the correct key signature. This has led to the suggestion that the K: field should be modified to permit the use of a collection of sharps or flats, so that transcribers can simply copy what they see on the manuscript without having to give thought to what the actual tonic (or mode) is. The problem with this suggestion is that it represents a degradation of the abc standard, since the resulting K: field contains less information, and while programs would still be able to display the staff notation or play the notes as specified, they would not easily be able to play the music in any intonation other than equal temperament, generate guitar chords automatically, transpose into different keys, or do anything else more interesting than those two basic functions. Furthermore, human nature being what it is, the introduction of this K: format would encourage many users to give up trying to figure out tonic+mode and simply take the easy way out by entering the key signature only. This in turn would inevitably lead to most new abc transcriptions adopting it, and the whole corpus of abc music would suffer. It's rather like the the economic principle of bad money driving out good. If the law was changed to make IOUs legal tender it is obvious that economic collapse would result, as nobody would bother with real money if they could just write "I owe you $25" on a piece of paper and have it accepted in payment. Please note Bryan, that I'm not objecting to this suggestion on the grounds that it's likely to be popular - I'm objecting to it because it represents an inadequate description of key information, and the fact that it's likely to be popular means that it's certain to have a deleterious effect on the whole body of abc music. If it was only likely to be used in those rare cases where the tonic is truly ambiguous I wouldn't care. Please note John, that I'm not objecting to the use of explicit key signatures for non-european music which can't be properly represented with 0-7 flats or sharps, but requires mixtures of accidentals. I don't mind if you give any random collection of sharps and flats in the K: field as long as you also give the tonic. Finally, if we want to make life easier for people transcribing from manuscript by permitting them to use an incomplete description of key, perhaps we should do the same thing for those transcribing by ear, and permit them to specify only the tonic. After all, any competent musician who was familiar with the tradition concerned should easily be able to figure out where to put the necessary accidentals in order to make sense of the tune. It's not a completely daft suggestion; it just shifts the reponsibility for working out the difficult bit of the K: field from the transcriber to the user, and is exactly analagous to the original suggestion. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
