Re: What can Premusic do that others can't?

[David Kastrup]

<address@hidden> writes:

>  I think that I should append a disclaimer to my format: I don't
>  intend it to be more comfortably sight-read than sheet music is and
>  will be. I simply intend to create an analogue of .txt where there is
>  only .docx and .odt. It is perfectly legible for simple pieces, and
>  perhaps an environment like Frescobaldi could be configured to
>  real-time display Premusic code as its appropriate sheet music for
>  more complex pieces - that environment would make my format into a
>  very formidable one indeed.

So you want it to be AsciiDoc for music.  Tablatures are actually
already done frequently in a somewhat similar manner and work reasonably
well for guitar music that is not too complicated.

For lots of music, the format's relation between visual and musical
complexity is not good enough to convey musical sense fast enough.  Even
for guitar music, it clutters the field of vision much more with symbols
than ASCII tablature does.

Mathematicians don't converse in ASCII notation but graphical formulas,
even if some of them are reasonably versed in looking at TeX notation.

Something like

    Dies ist
    \begin{multline}
    \label{eq:51}
      f(t+\Delta t,x) = \beta\frac{d(x)}{d(x)+d(x-\Delta x)}
        f(t,x-\Delta x)\\
      + (1-2\beta + \beta \frac{d(x)}{d(x)+d(x+\Delta x)}
        + \beta\frac{d(x)}{d(x)+d(x-\Delta x)})\,f(t,x)\\
      + \beta\frac{d(x)}{d(x)+d(x+\Delta x)}\,f(t,x+\Delta x)
    \end{multline}
    Für die weitere Herleitung kürzen wir jetzt die Ableitung etwa von $d$
    nach der Ortskoordinate~$x$ mit $d'$ ab.

is quite harder to peruse than

    Dies ist

    Für die weitere Herleitung kürzen wir jetzt die Ableitung etwa von

    nach der Ortskoordinate~

 mit

 ab.

Music is similar in that respect.  AsciiDoc has a much simpler task
since its principal substance is letters and it is used for structuring
text.  Nevertheless it has not become the bees' knees of documentation
writing, it is just one semipopular way of doing things.

There are numerous forms of piano roll notation that are a lot better
candidates for playing material than your proposal.  Maybe you should
look at them for inspiration.

-- 
David Kastrup