On Jan 22, 2004, at 12:11 AM, John Chambers wrote:
One problem that I see with the above example is that the K
line gives C as the tonic.  It really should be K:D...  The
notation has been suggested:

K:D_E_B "bayati"

This would mean a tonic of D, a key signature of _E_B, and

Yeah the C is misleading. But D implies D-major (2 sharps...) Isn't there some sort of "none" notation of something (or is that only for M:) -- I'd like to not break any existing stuff too much.

BTW: at least arabic/turkish scales may also have a tonic
we don't have a western note for: e.g. _/E (e-half-flat or thereabouts).


the  "bayati" intonation or scale.  A music formatter would
draw the _E_B signature and ignore the scale name, while  a
music player would ignore the _E_B keysig stuff and look up
the scale name to tune each note.  This is similar to  how,
if  you  tell  a  musician  "D  major",  you don't list the
accidentals, because that will be obvious.

Which is why I'd like to have some sort of macro for the keysig. Maybe it should just be:

K:"bayati" or K:"d_bayati" or K:!d_bayati! or K:$d_bayati$

and the "_/E_B" business should be in the library/macro.

This would not upset the standard too much and be a fairly
powerful incremental feature.  (A *really* powerful feature if
the macro supports arguments and conditionals)

An alternative is to have a way to define the intervals
for an octave in factional steps (or some other unit):

bayati=0.75, 0.75, 1, 1, 0.5, 1, 1

and then have an operation to apply the tonic.
But this, I think, would require more agreement and more work
by various developers.... (and if you're going to do that
then we should evaluate Jack's plan to actually build the
scales out of smaller units before doing anything...)




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