Jon Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> So my suggestion was only that there be a uniform > notation for transmission that all music software vendors would agree to so > they could accept any other software's transmission. I agree that this would be highly desirable, but, as with all standards, there will be some difficult compromises to negotiate. An example is found in the work of the unicode committee (which I will not diverge into a discussion of). Programs do not like to have multiple ways of naming things, they prefer unique labels; it simplifys the task of parsing documents. The notation of music has a long history, in western europe we consider its formal beginnings to have been published in medieval latin, so its initial terms were Latin. This gives us Maxima, Longa, Breve... as terms for notes of differeing durations. During the late renaissance many of the mysteries of music were of necessity exposed by printed books, which were writen in the language of the people; giving us other names for the same terms - crotchet, quaver...; quarter note, half note... Any standard worth adopting would have to begin by deciding on the terms it will employ, if we settle on the old latin terms we will probably accomodate early music needs, perhaps even better than if we employ more recent terms, but not necessarily; I wonder how the inventions of petrucci, those flags that signified 5:1 proportions for example were termed... Latin had its shortcommings, we might stumble as a result of them. Those members of the committee who find british terms second-nature would have trouble abandoning them; those who find the british terms a puzzle would have trouble adopting them... Tehn, there is the need to see beyond the present need, those of us with a myopic focus on renaissance tablature might miss the need for symbol names for stuff used commonly in the baroque, or in modern guitar tablature; hereis where the value of a committee is seen, providing it has a broad enough membership base. If one then expands the standard to embrace renaissance staff notation, then expands it again to encompass modern staff notation, one runs up against the hyper-modern notations needed for the works of Cage et al. And, one then discovers that there is a committee working on some aspects of that, in order to establish sysmbol names usable in the context of unicode (er, ISO 10646). To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
