On 6 Nov 2010, at 03:33, Erich Enke wrote:
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.
LilyPond focuses on staff notation, and may in the future have capacities for your needs. For example, there is some support for key- signatures beyond major/minor, also microtonal, but it is limited. There is an extension by Graham Breed to arbitrary scales, also where the diapason is not the octave, but it tied to a specific tuning.
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.
It is mostly the interface that is is absolute, but the underlying pitch model need not be so, even though one must have some reference point. If one outputs a MIDI file, one still needs a tuning note.
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.
It seems that the suggest to use E72 (72 equal temperament). In Turkish music one is using E53, where the minor second is m = 4, and major second M = 9, which in turn is just a very good approximation of the Pythagorean tuning. One can in fact move to a more abstract model, which does not assign specific values to these defining intervals until later when producing an audio file, but currently in LilyPond, it is tied to specific tuning.
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.
This happens in Georgian singing and Arab maqam, too. But it seems me that the interval ratio 2 still may appear say when letting male and female voices or letting a violin play with an oud.
_______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
