At 12:38 PM 1/5/06 -0800, Eric Dannewitz wrote: >Seriously, it makes sense where it is. It doesn't make sense at all to >move it somewhere else.
But it makes sense to re-think things that have caused confusion. In David's thinking, octave doubling is not transposition, and indeed it is not (even if that's one way to get there). So what is it? It's parallel motion, quite a different thing even if it looks the same at first glance and the program has a trick to get there. But where are these parallel motion options? They're balled into transposition, but that's both a weak placement and bad musical sense. Let's look at why. Consider the canonic utilities plugin. What is it doing where it is? I don't know. I have no idea why these natively included Finale features are under yet another scattered set of menus. But there they are. And canonic utilities have transposition options and canonic options -- but no option (in 2005) to 'preserve original notes'! In fact, I went there to see if this might fill the bill, and it doesn't. But parallel motion is the very kind of scoring assistance that one might expect, and is the "O" form of canonic behavior at a given transposition. Now back to the transposition dialog. Given the idea of 'discoverability' that David mentions (and I don't mean to misinterpret him here), there should be multiple ways of arriving at musical as well as engraving behaviors. One is to expand the transposition options to include both preserving the original lines and having *multiple* simultaneous transpositions. Confusing, right? What would that be? It would be parallel chord motion. Tremendously useful -- but not transposition. Now we have *two* things that aren't really transposition. But now we get closer. Transposition with expanded options. Canonic utilities with expanded options. Hmmm... and suddenly, there is the idea for a new item that covers both (discoverable from multiple paths) that is a linear motion modification activity. [Transposition, Doubling, Parallel Motion, Canonic Utilities] is essentially one palette of options dealing with the many ways of displacing pitches while maintaining their melodic contour. Once the programmers grasp that, they can build an easy dialog with richer options (more than we have now using the same programming modules), based upon musical behavior, and discoverable in many ways. Nothing is lost, and much is gained. You get your transpositional thinking, David gets his doubling, I get my canonical behavior. Name it well and the problem is solved entirely. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
