On 26/09/13 17:16, Phil Holmes wrote:
I think it's waiting for someone to propose how it could be represented in
LilyPond. If _someone_ were to do that, it might progress - it was only a few
months ago it was last looked at.
Unfortunately, it was someone putting forward a workaround which I'd already
proposed and found lacking, as it doesn't play nice with transposition :-(
There was actually a patch submitted which tweaked the internal pitch
representation appropriately: https://codereview.appspot.com/3789044/
... but work on it seems to have been abandoned.
_Conceptually_, the problem is this: Lilypond's pitch model consists of
PITCH = STAFF_POSITION + ALTERATION
where alteration is some fraction of a whole tone. (Actually there's no
theoretical limit. You could have 3/2 of a tone, 2 tones ... although because
the current transposition rules have a hard-coded limit of +/- 1, it's actually
impossible in practice to transpose into keys where you might have triple sharps
or flats. Hey, they do exist...:-)
That model works fine for the standard 12 chromatic pitches, and it works fine
for microtonal notation where each microtonal alteration is represented by a
unique accidental. It fails for microtonal notation that essentially consists of
PITCH = STAFF_POSTION + ALTERATION_0 + ALTERATION_1 + ... + ALTERATION_n
of which quarter-tone arrow notation is one example (you have a first-order
alteration which is the regular accidental, and a second-order alteration which
is the up- or down- arrows).
Ben Johnston's notation for "extended just intonation" is another example that
very strongly relies on this hierarchy of pitch shading -- see e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kVdgCWFJzE
... and
http://notesfromadefeatist.blogspot.it/2010/01/just-intonation-notation.html for
some explanation.
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