Hi all, I just happened across a Sept 2010 post on lilypond-devel regarding microtones. It reminded me how I've been wanting to work on Byzantine notation support for lilypond. I would love to have a tool that could actually transcribe between western and Byzantine notation, and produce midis. That would be amazing.
The choice of lilypond is clear. It's open source. It would allow, ultimately, for musical searching of a music database, and various other musico-analytical researches and scripting. It's free. There's internationalization. So, toward that end, I can describe the needs of Byzantine notation. What I'm hoping for are some tips and pointers of where to get started, some basic understandings of the underlying pitching system, and a general idea of the sort of work and difficulties I might come across. In Byzantine church music (not sure on other forms of Byzantine music), we have the following: 1) A notation that is completely relative, based on a particular place in a scale (roughly analogous to saying "Start on fa"). There is no notion of absolute pitch whatsoever. Just interval. This allows for easy accommodation of the same music to different chanters' voices without transposition. Likewise, there is no necessity for a key signature. Only scale. 2) A one-to-many correlation between Byzantine neumes and Western notational elements. One Byzantine neume might translate into several Western noteheads, dynamic markings, and stylistic markings simultaneously. 3) An entirely different font, with generally, but not strictly left-to-right (but with Arabic, right-to-left) direction. Sometimes neumes are stacked, and sometimes seems more like adding linguistic diacritical markings. 4) A multitude of standard (within Byzantine chant) scales, which have microtonal intervals. Many Byzantine music theoreticians break down an octave into 72 "moria". 6 moria are a Western half step. But different theoreticians differ on the exact spacing. Here's one version (using our version of solfege: Ni, Pa, Vu, Ga, Di, Ke, Zo, Ni): Soft Chromatic: Ni - 8 - Pa - 14 - Vu - 8 - Ga - 12 - Di - 8 - Ke - 14 - Zo - 8 - Ni' Hard Chromatic: Pa - 6 - Vu - 20 - Ga - 4 - Di - 12 - Ke - 6 - Zo - 20 - Ni' - 4 - Pa' Diatonic: Ga - 12 - Di - 10 - Ke - 8 - Zo - 12 - Ni - 12 - Pa - 10 - Vu - 8 - Ga' Enharmonic: Ga - 12 - Di - 12 - Ke - 6 - Zo - 12 - Ni - 12 - Pa - 12 - Vu - 6 - Ga' The Byzantine enharmonic scale is the only one that fits on the piano nicely, corresponding to the Western diatonic scale. 5) To make matters more tricksy, Byzantine music isn't even octave-based. So, when you extend beyond these ranges, there are standard expected intervals, but they're predictable on a tetrachordal, trichordal, or pentachordal basis, not on octaves. 6) There's a syntactic rules of orthography that could ideally be included, including which way to properly notate something in relation to the particular accentuation of your text. 7) The fundamental assumption of the music fitting to the text, and not vice versa. It is primarily the words that are read and properly spaced, and the neumes are read in the periphery. There's probably other points I'm missing, but those are some of the main ones. I expect that this challenges core musical assumptions lilypond may hold. If lilypond is to be truly a music engine of the world, and not just of and for Western culture, then this interaction and growth will be beneficial, though some core refactoring would probably be necessary (I'm guessing). Anyway, I hope you found that brief survey to be interesting, at least, and I look forward to what advice you might have to offer. Erich _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
