Martin Tarenskeen writes: | The standard says: | | "middle=<pitch> is an alternate way to define the line number of the clef. | The pitch indicates what note is displayed on the 3rd line of the staff." | | I believe this description is not correct/clear. For example [K:bass | middle=d] does NOT mean that the note displayed on the 3rd line on a staff | with a bass clef is d. After all, this still note still represents D, (if | no "transpose" is used). It just means that in the abc code the user may | notate this "D," using "d". | | The description should therefore be changed to something like: | | "The pitch indicates what notation is used for the note that is displayed | on the third line of the staff." | | Maybe someone who's native language is English can come up with a better | formulation.
Well, as a native speaker of English, I find this baffling. The main issue is that notes on paper don't have pitch. I regularly play written music on several instruments, and get notes of all sorts of different pitches. On my accordion, a key can produce notes in several octaves, depending on which stop I use. So the above quoted description is just nonsensical. Anything that talks about the "pitch" of printed music has got something very wrong. Pitch belongs to played notes, not written notes. For getting printed music, what I need to know is: If I want a note on the 3rd staff line, what do I type? For bass clef, the obvious answer is "d", though it seems that others think it should be "D" or "D," or maybe even "D,,". For that matter, maybe it should be "d'" for piccolo or soprano recorder. But all of these are a pain to type. Since most of the notes in most voices will be on the staff, I want to type single letters for the notes on the staff. Software that converts notes to pitches can handle the octave and/or transposition issues. Computers are good at that sort of thing, as are musical instruments. One problem with abc's note notation is that mixtures of upper-case letters and commas are awkward and slow to type correctly. This is fine for computer-generated abc, but not for human typists. We really shouldn't force this on users; it's quite a user-hostile thing to do. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
