Re: Microtonal Helmholtz-Ellis notation in Lilypond: fine-tuning

[Torsten Anders]

Dear Stefan,

Sorry for my late reply.

Stefan wrote
> I was able to try out the example. There is one not convincing for me:
> The default accidental is an natural. But I would like to use fis  
> and ges as before.

You can easily switch to the standard Lily accidental treatment where  
the HE accidentals are then supported additionally. Quote from the  
Readme file of the HE-Lily.zip file I just sent:

  Note that this code completely disables the common Lilypond
  accidentals, because the spacing (and to some extend also the
  shape) of these and the HE accidentals differ considerably. In
  order to allow for the common Lilypond accidentals anyway, comment
  the three Lilypond code lines in the score layout section that set
  accidentals to be written written as markups by default and sets
  the default HE accidental.

Nevertheless, I feel in most situations you actually want an  
accidental for every note (including naturals) in order to avoid  
misunderstandings. In fact, the published scores using HE notation  
tend to do this.

> Wouldnt it a possibilitie to define new pitch-names, like it has  
> been done in the makam.ly?
> But how can this be done?

As far as I understand, the approach of the makam.ly example allows  
only for one single accidental per note. Question to the Lily-gurus:  
is that actually correct?

With the HE notation however, you can theoretically have an arbitrary  
number of accidentals per note. For example, a single note C sharp may  
be raised by two septimal commas and flattened by a 11-comma, so you  
have 3-4 (!) accidentals that are assigned to a single note head (the  
2 septimal commas can be drawn as 1 or 2 accidentals). Also, in just  
intonation you have an unlimited number of different pitches in  
principle. So, you would need an unlimited number of different note  
names if you want fully generic support. At least you would need a  
pretty large number of note names, even if you only want to cover some  
subset of the pitch lattice. For example, if you allow for only up to  
2 Pythagorean accidentals in each direction, 3 syntonic commas in each  
direction (HE has special single signs for these), up to two septimal  
commas, one 11-comma, one 13-comma, one 17-comma, one 19-comma, one 23- 
comma etc., then the required number of note names is the number of  
all possible combinations of these times the seven nominals C, D, E, F  
and so forth. So, we would need (if I get this math right, others are  
welcome to correct :)

  5 (Pythagorean accidentals) * 7 (syntonic) * 5 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3  
(etc.) * 7
  = 297,675

different note names. I feel this number of note names gets impractical.

I therefore feel the approach inserting some \HE <accidental-string>  
is more generic and still pretty concise.

Best
Torsten

--
Torsten Anders
Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research
University of Plymouth
Office: +44-1752-586219
Private: +44-1752-558917
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