Monday, February 10, 2020, 10:00:03 PM, you wrote: > On 2020/02/09 16:15:53, thomasmorley651 wrote: >> On 2020/02/09 15:32:14, http://lilypond_ptoye.com wrote: >> >> > Surely "standard scale pitch or previously altered pitch". In D > major: "cis c >> > cis" the first note is an alteration but not an accidental, the > second is an >> > accidental but not an alteration, the third is both. Now I'm really > splitting >> > hairs. >> >> I read this as "In D major the note c _is_ an accidental". >> Or did you mean _has_ an accidental? >> >> > I'm beginning to think that this is all getting too theologial. I'm > a >> practising musician, not a theorist, and I raised the point as I'd never >> heard of >> > 'alteration' used in this rather technical sense. If people are > happy with the >> > distinction let's just keep it and I withdraw my suggestion. >> >> Wait. If we try to improve the docs we need to care about best > wordings, so that >> people speaking different language and with different musical > education >> understand what we want to express.
> +1 >> >> Furthermore we need to explain how we do things in LilyPond. >> Look at: >> mus = { \key d \major cis'4 } >> #(display-scheme-music (car (music-pitches mus))) >> #(display-scheme-music (ly:pitch-alteration (car (music-pitches > mus)))) >> => >> (ly:make-pitch 0 0 1/2) >> 1/2 >> >> First how the cis is seen in LilyPond, second the alteration. > (ofcourse no >> Accidental is printed in pdf) >> Do the same with note c and you see no alteration, i.e. 0 (ofcourse an >> Accidental is printed) >> Do similar with c and cis (and you see the alteration for cis again > and an >> accidental for cis is printed) > However, I think that the description of > LilyPond's internal pitch data > structure > is not helpful for this (pretty introductory) part of the docs. > The longer I think about it, the more I'm unsure if the term > "alteration" makes > sense for a basic understanding how pitches are entered in LilyPond. > If I think about a, lets say D major scale, I would not say that the > pitch 'fis' is an 'altered' note, though it is stored that way in the > data structure. 'Alteration' for me always > refers to some 'unaltered' > form. > Our pitch naming system with a 'nucleus' (e.g. 'f') and some suffices > (e.g. '-is') OTOH supports the conclusion, that a pitch consists of > some base, diatonic pitch and possibles alterations. > It is also conclusive, though, that LilyPond > uses the C major scale as the base for its pitch structure. The nub of the question is the difference between how a musician thinks of a note name and how it get written/engraved. If I'm working on paper I don't think of 'C sharp' as 'C' modified by 'sharp'. I think of it as a single entity. It's about 70 years since I learnt musical notation, and that was in the English system on the piano, where the white notes have names which are letters, and the black notes have what I was told (somewhat incorrectly) were called 'accidentals'. I think key signatures came later. I discovered about German notation using 'B' for the note one diatonic tone below C much later - so my previous comment about the 'black notes' doesn't work. I've just had a very quick look at musicXML and I have to admit that this seems to take the same view as LilyPond - note plus alteration - and they even use the tag <alter> for the latter. So the use of 'alteration' as a technical term does at least have some justification. But my concern was, and still is, that a newbie coming to Lilypond and needing to check up on exactly how to engrave a C sharp won't find much help in the section headings in the LM. I speak from experience form my early fumblings with LP. We shouldn't discourage new users by hiding what are, in practical terms, the easy bits. >> >> This is absolutely inline with my thinking. >> Though, c itself in D major can't be called an accidental. >> In my book an Accidental is always the printed ♯-sign or ♭-sign or > natural or >> double-sharp/flat, nothing else, never the note itself. > +1 Agreed, it's a note with and accidental natural sign. I've already covered this in other replies here. >> >> Furthermore in german we have the distinction between "Vorzeichen" and >> "Versetzungszeichen", in lilypond that would be the accidental-grobs > from >> KeySignature and the additional "on the fly" Accidentals in music. > Can you cite sources for this? Being also a > practising german musician > I've never used the term "Versetzungszeichen" and I thought it to > be synonymous with "Vorzeichen". What I know and (rarely) use is > the term "Generalvorzeichen". These would be the KeySignature > accidentals. > https://codereview.appspot.com/579280043/