[midi] [articulate] \stopTrillSpan, \staccatissimo, and \appoggiatura

[Iain Nicol]

Hi,

I've playing about with Peter Chubb's `Articulate' for improved MIDI
output.  (Thanks, Peter: I wrote a less ambitious file a couple years
ago just for staccatos---and then accidentally deleted it.)

Anyway, I've got a few suggested changes, with patches.  The patches are
against the copy of articulate linked to from
<http://www.nicta.com.au/people/chubbp/articulate>; the patches should
apply with `patch < file.diff' in the same directory as articulate.ly.

1. Trills.  I'm not sure about this(!), but my interpretation of the
fragment
    c\startTrillSpan d e\stopTrillSpan
is that it's similar to
    c\trill d\trill e
whereas articulate thinks it's similar to
    c\trill d\trill e\trill.

One reason why I think this is that TrillSpanner supports the to-barline
property. Look at the output of:
    {
      \override TrillSpanner #'to-barline = ##t
      c1\startTrillSpan | e | g\stopTrillSpan g |
    }
Still, I'm not certain, because the wiggly lines do sometimes look a bit
ambiguous.  In case I am right, though, there's a patch which changes
articulate's behaviour.

2. Staccatissimo.  I've got a simple patch to add \staccatissimo.
Nothing fancy: it's implemented just like the \staccato, only it takes a
quarter of the note's value by default, not a half.

3. Appoggiatura.  Unfortunately, articulate's \appoggiatura doesn't
quite work (at least for me with Lilypond version 2.12.2).  For example,
    \include "articulate.ly"
    \articulate {\appoggiatura d8 c4}
doesn't give quaver to both the d and the c.  Instead, it halves the
written length of each of the two notes; it's like you'd written 
    d16 c8.

To test this, look at or listen to the output of the following file.  We
want the crotchets of both voices to sound together, but they don't.
    \include "articulate.ly"
    \score {
      <<
        \articulate \relative c' {\appoggiatura d8 c4 c c c}
        \relative e' {e4 e e e }
      >>
      \midi{}
      \layout{}
    }
The attached patch fixes this.

(Finally, I noticed there's been a heated discussion on -devel recently
about licensing.  I know my patches are really small,
possibly---probably?---not big enough to be copyrightable.  I also know
that articulate.ly is licensed as GPL v2 only...  However, for the sake
of being unambiguous: I consider my patches to be GPL v2 or later.)

Thanks,
-- 
Iain Nicol
<http://www.iainnicol.com./>

trill.diff
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staccatissimo.diff
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appoggiatura.diff
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