> I'm a newcomer here. Has the issue of non-12 tone music come up here > before?
Yes, I've posted two or three fairly detailed proposals over the years, covering both playback and printing. > A lot of middle eastern (Turkish, Arabic, Persian, etc...) music is > based on a quarter-tone (24 division) system; or in the case of some > Turkish music up to 48 (or even more) divisions of the octave. No they aren't. Quarter-tones are sometimes used in modern texts (particularly Arabic ones) as an approximation to the real thing, but the underlying model of Middle Eastern and Indian-subcontinent music is much more sophisticated. What all these genres use is the idea of a mode created by selection from a large microtonal pitch set. In Indian music this is the 22 "shrutis" (whose pitches are not necessarily equally tempered and probably vary between regions and idioms); in Turkish or Iranian music the basic unit is the Pythagorean comma (with a secondary measurement scheme derived from it forming a namelessly implicit 24-note non-equally-tempered pitch set which functions like the shrutis and is represented by the fretting of the tanbur). From this you derive the modes - ragas, makams, dastgahs - by selecting from that large set: 1. a rising pitch set 2. a falling pitch set 3. a few optional accidentals 4. a bunch of standard melodic cadences The rising and falling sets are not usually very different and don't have more than 7 notes, the accidentals tend to be used sparingly, and the cadences can't be represented in a key signature. So what happens is that people reduce each mode, for purposes of printing, to one key signature (the rising scale) and indicate the variations used for falling passages or cadences by accidentals. That system makes a suitable target for an ABC representation. The elements that need to be incorporated are: 1. the underlying pitch-measurement scheme (shrutis, commas, cents, harmonic ratios, rational fractions of a tone and probably others I haven't thought of) 2. selections from that to (reusably) define 7-note modes, mapping these onto ABC note names (Indian music uses modes with fewer notes, but these are considered as derived from 7-note modes) 3. a means of representing accidentals in ABC source 4. a library of graphical signs to represent the microtones in either the key signature or in accidentals within the tune body when creating staff notation (there are only a few of these, see any text on Middle Eastern music). What that would give you is a representational scheme which extends ABC in exactly the right way to match the model of microtonal-modal music already in use by its practitioners. A scheme which requires people to use MIDI and fractions is so alien to the way anybody actually thinks about this stuff that it would be utterly unusable. You MUST have a way of defining named modes so you can refer to notes by single letters, the way you find them named in Indian music texts. Karl Signell's _Makam: Modal Practice in Turkish Art Music_ is a good place to start in identifying the issues (he makes a clear distinction what what happens notationally and what actually goes on in practice, something Turkish sources tend not to do - there are situations where you want to notate theoretical rather than actual intonation, just as there are in Western diatonic music). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
