Bryan Creer writes: | John Chambers wrote - | >I've also found the phrase "explicit key signature" more useful than | >"global accidentals", though I don't suppose that's a real big deal. | | These seem to me to be two separate things. Whem converted to conventional | notation, an "explicit key signature" is the collection of sharps, naturals and | flats you find at the start of the staff; "global accidentals" are | accidentals applied to notes throughout the music. (Does anybody ever use these?)
The difference is somewhat minimal, though. The original text had as example "K:D =c", which implies a key signature of two sharps but with a natural written before all the c's. The natural reaction to this is "If all the c's are natural, why put a c sharp in the signature and then cancel it everywhere?" This is indeed rather silly. It's better to just use ^f as the key signature. OTOH, using "K:Dmix=c" with ^f=c as the signature can be sensible, because that c natural in the key signature instead of a sharp is an "advisory accidental" that emphasizes the fact that the c is not sharp. | >Careful readers might note that I also dropped the old standard's | >requirement that global accidentals be set off by spaces. | | Setting off by spaces is the only way to distinguish between these two | different things in John's proposed notation. I doubt that this is a useful distinction. I'd think that a better approach would be to put the accidentals in the key signature by default. An option to put them before the notes could be useful, though I expect that only a few advanced abc tools would ever do that. In the only uses I can think of for such a feature, I'd find it more useful to be able to turn this on and off with a runtime option. Doing it by editing the abc would not be nearly as useful. Also, experience has shown that abc users are not likely to follow such persnickety rules for use of spaces. You and me and Jack Campin maybe, but how many others? After all, we can't even get them to use X:1 lines in their tunes. People who write abc parsers quickly learn that, unless you want to hand-edit 90% of the tunes you get before using them, you have to make your parser very accepting of trivial formatting variants. Accepting odd white space is a large part of this job, along with accepting strange double-bar symbols. | I would like to propose the addition of two new optional parameters to the K: | command; tonic= and mode=. Using these, John's K:Amix=g could become - | | K:^f^c=g tonic=A mode=mixolydian | | which seems much clearer to me. If we were designing abc from scratch, I'd agree. As it is now, I'd guess that few if any users would ever use this, mostly because it's so much wordier. So I'd think that such clear but wordy notation would be appropriate for the more complete notations like MusicML or LilyPond, while ABC's "K:Amix=g" is more in keeping with ABC's compact style. And it really is mostly a matter of style. ABC is compact and cryptic, but easy to type. We might as well keep it that way. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
