Re: Microtonal accidentals

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 03/11/13 11:20, Hans Aberg wrote:
> FYI, some "Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI” accidentals [1-2], in fact designed 
> quite recently, but a nice input. There is also a Unicode font at [3]. Notation also 
> mentioned at [4].
>
> The arrow accidentals that LilyPond has, are used for syntonic comma 81/81 
> alterations (staff system in Pythagorean tuning). LilyPond does not have those 
> for double sharps and double flats. In addition, there are accidentals with 
> double arrows, for double syntonic comma alterations, which LilyPond does not 
> have. (And even triple arrows.)
>
> Some traditional quartertone accidentals end up on the 11-limit rational 
> interval 33/32, which seems to be a good idea: in E72, it is approximated with 
> E24 quartertones.
>
> 1. http://www.newmusicbox.org/assets/72/HelmholtzEllisLegend.pdf
> 2. http://www.marcsabat.com/pdfs/notation.pdf
> 3. http://www.marcsabat.com/
> 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation

Interesting references, thank you!

It's worth bearing in mind that those symbols are far from absolute in their 
meaning -- different composers have used them to indicate different things.

For Lilypond in particular, the problem of supporting microtonal notation is 
less about symbols per se and more about the underlying representation of pitch, 
and how that relates both to accidentals and transposition.

Short version: in many microtonal notations, the number of enharmonic pitches is 
expanded -- but Lilypond has no way to represent these enharmonics.