The issue is consistency and I'm perhaps not using the terms precisely enough 
to describe what I am seeing.

I understand about MIDI notes  and that they are neither sharpened not 
flattened, but each has their own value.

In my sequencer (Cakewalk ProAudio 9), if my piece has a Key Signature event in 
the .MIDI (I'm not talking about a Cakewalk format file) file of "G", I see a 
staff with an F sharp at the beginning of the staff and no sharp signs on Fs in 
the piece.

When I create MIDI output from Lilypond, if I have imported a MIDI file and 
then resaved it with changes made in LilyPond, the output is like that, too.

However, when I create new files,  I am getting output that is as if I have 
chosen to write everything in C major, with all the flats and sharps shown 
explicitly. Nevertheless, the screen and pdf output are written in, for example 
G, with no sharps on the individual fis notes.

So ,what appears to me to be happening is I have written code that works for 
layout {} but just this aspect of it is ignored by midi {}
But I am new to LilyPond so that deduction may be nonsense. I have much more 
experience of MIDI files and have been using the same software for many years 
and am aware of its idiosyncracies.

In LilyPond,  I have other similar issues which suggest to me I am making a 
bigger, more fundamental mistake in my coding, so I will investigate that 
before asking for any more help and in that case I will bring the necessary 
snippets to the forum.

Thanks for your interest.



________________________________
From: msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca <msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
Sent: 10 May 2024 21:21
To: Hans Åberg <haber...@telia.com>
Cc: Giles Boardman <giles.board...@hotmail.co.uk>; lilypond-user@gnu.org 
<lilypond-user@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Key signatures in MIDI output

On Fri, 10 May 2024, Hans Åberg wrote:

> > signature.  The MIDI file does not contain that information; it is up to
> > whatever software reads the MIDI file, to display it appropriately.
>
> So to go back to staff notation from MIDI, one must know what enharmonic
> equivalences that have been applied.

Yes - and it's not Lilypond that does that step, so if the translation
back to staff notation is not as desired, there's little that can be done
within Lilypond to fix it.

--
Matthew Skala
msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before tribes.
https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

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