Re: Parallel Square Premusic

[Malte Meyn]

Am 20.03.2017 um 02:11 schrieb address@hidden:
> I have invented an extremely robust and perfectly extensible plaintext file 
> format called Parallel Squares.
This sounds very promising, let’s do a partial fact check.

> premusic (I use this word to describe instructions for how to play music, […])
Look mom, I invented a word! Besides of that: You cannot play from those
scores as they are huge.

> []ly  
> ________Hap___birth___________Hap___birth___________Hap___birth___..._____Hap___birth_________
> []ly  
> _________-py___-day____________-py___-day____________-py___-day_______...__-py___-day_________
> []ly  
> __________________to__you!______________to__you!______________dear_________________to__you!___
This isn’t readable.

> []pi  
> ----D4------||--D4D4||----A3--A3--||--A3A3||----D4--D4--||--D4D4||----G4--G4--||--D4D4||D4----
> []pi  
> ----B3------||--B3B3||----F#--F#--||--F#F#||----B3--B3--||--B3B3||----E3--E3--||--B3C4||B3----
> []pi  
> G2--G3------||G2G3G3||D2--D3--D3--||D2D3D3||G2--G3--G3--||G2G3G3||C2--C3--C3--||G2G3F#||G3G2--
This seems to be how you do chords. So for Liszt piano music you need 16
lines of text instead of two or four as in traditional notation?

> This allows for exponentially many more useful symbols than there are keys on 
> a keyboard.
Not exponentially. Quadratically. And not every possible combination is
also useful.

> Only measures with many fast notes need many squares - a whole note measure 
> could very well be just ||da||.
1 | 2... 32 (LilyPond)
vs.
||d||daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad|| (PSP)
This is one fast note, not many.

> Sharps and flats may be obtained by lowercasing the letter for a flat or, for 
> example, "D%" for "D5 sharp". (Look at your keyboard!)
Are you serious? No double accidentals (you called the format “perfectly
extensible” if I remember correctly), flats and sharps are totally
differently coded, and you depend on a f***ing keyboard layout? This is
as far from robust as the format is from being a standard that people
will use (I’m sorry to say that because you put much work and thoughts
in it but I cannot imagine any musician using this).

> I am fairly comfortably able to compose PSPremusic in a simple text editor, 
> but it's not optimized for the purpose. […]
Throughout the thread you mention notepad.exe several times. But here we
see that this isn’t realistic at all. Other languages like LilyPond are
realistically handled with in a simple text editor (ok, syntax
highlighting is nice but most editors have that). And they have the
advantage that you can have the corresponding traditional notation in
another window (f. e. as a PDF).