>|> Is ~ a roll or a turn? >| According to ABC 1.7.6, it's a roll:
One more disaster with that "standard". The 1.6 standard said: : Alternatively, the tilde symbol ~ represents the general gracing : of a note which, in the context of traditional music, can mean : different things for different instruments, for example a roll, : cran or staccato triplet which is exactly what you want a new symbol for, having just dumped an already agreed one: > Any Baroque musician is familiar with the convention that a '+' > above a note means "Ornament this note somehow". It's a generic, > unspecific ornament symbol. I personally would like it to mean > this in abc ~ has been around so long with its 1.6 meaning that almost every file on the web that uses it can be assumed to have the nonspecific semantics (which is not accidental, that's what Breathnach used it for in "Ceol Rince na hEireann" and where Chris got the idea). And in this situation you have no syntactic clue to tell you if the author might have had the redefined sense in mind. At this point it is WAY too late to think of imposing a new meaning on it. In fact + doesn't always have that generic sense in Baroque music. In English recorder music of the early 18th century it always means a trill starting on the note above. I brought that up a few years ago and the situation hasn't changed: BarFly can give me the semantics I want but not the original sign, abcm2ps's syntax can give me the graphical sign but can't represent its meaning in a way any player program could ever interpret. A full solution would need to allow new graphical elements to be introduced (in a platform-independent way, say as GIFs; in the worst case they might have to be taken from a scan of a manuscript) and allow their meaning to be redefinable, in case new scholarship finds that for some particular piece, a different set of conventions were really in force than those the transcriber had in mind. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
