Re: "Ancient and modern from one source"

[Michael J. O'Donnell]

I have used parallel voices with notes in one and other information in another quite a bit recently. It can get quite hairy to keep the voices in sync when you edit durations. That isn't so hard with a relatively sparse sequence, such as time signatures, but I think there are two better methods:

1. Define a separate variable for each sequence of notes with a consistent time signature. Since time changes are sparse, there aren't too many of them. Concatenate them with different time signature declarations for different scores.

2. Define a LilyPond function to produce the time signature. Use different definitions of the function for different types of score.

#2 is my preferred method. Time signature is a musical issue, not just a formatting issue, and I like to keep music together. Also, mensural indications of time don't correspond precisely to modern ones, and you might want the function to manipulate duration scaling factors or other parameters as well as time signature itself. Many of these can probably go into a parallel voice, but I'm not sure in advance. The special function (e.g., I have \TempusPerfectumProlatioImperfectum and \TempusPerfectumProlatioImperfectumAllaBreve in the song that I am working on now) allows very general adjustments in the future, some of which we might not think of at first. If I can get a grip on the scope of variation within some reasonable range of mensural and modern scores, I will define some sharable functions that do sensible things based on a few user-settable parameters. The treatment of mensural notation should probably make explicit use of the tactus somewhere, and I suspect (don't see it in detail yet) that the function definition method will be a good structure for incorporating an explicit representation of tactus.

#1 has the virtue of requiring no programming effort. (But, the functions don't have to be tricky---you can start out with a case-by-case redefinition, and incorporate something more systematic if/when it is available).

BTW, if anyone wanted to see my prototype files for generating mensural and modern scores from a single note file, please let me know off line (address@hidden). The server on which I shared this material blew a CPU fan, and will be off line for a week or so. I will make other arrangements for sharing if someone is interested, but otherwise I'll just wait for the new fan.

Cheers,

Mike O'Donnell

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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:38:31 +0200
From: "Dmytro O. Redchuk" <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: "Ancient and modern from one source"
To: "C.Flothow" <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

У сб, 2010-01-09 у 21:58 +0100, C.Flothow пише:
    

This looks very promising as an answer to my first question. Once I
had figured out the correct combination of the different functions it
worked on the music level for the example. So I have to think of a
reasonable way to deal with the embedded time signatures / signature
fractions. Or is there already a corresponding function around which I
have missed?
    

I would probably try to declare separate voice with time signatures
and write time signatures only in that voice.

And then to parallel it with real voices.

In this case you would need to change only that voice.

Or it's possible to declare two or three such a voices and use
appropriate of them.

Sorry! --- i've not tried this trick for this task --- sorry for the
(possible) noise :O)

  

Cheers 
Chris