Re: Parallel Square Premusic

[Malte Meyn]

Please always reply to the messages you are actually quoting/referring
to so mail clients and archives put the mails in the thread in correct
order.

Am 22.03.2017 um 02:10 schrieb address@hidden:
> I'm not sure how the octave of a pitch is ambiguous?? Scientific pitch 
> notation is pretty well defined...
Hm … I don’t know either what the person you are referring to meant
because your mail is lacking the context described above. But I told you
about how D# for D sharp 5 is far from robust because in other keyboard
layouts numbers+shift give different results:

US layout: #
Dvorak layout: (
UK layout: £ (not present in ASCII)
German layout: § (not in ASCII)
neo layout: ℓ (neither in ASCII nor in the Latin-1 ASCII extension)
French layout: needs shift to reach the numbers so instead of shift just
use no shift and get "

Sadly there was no answer how you want to handle this problem.

> Please explain what you mean by 'markup'?
I don’t know which the original message you replied to is but “markups”
in LilyPond are all kinds of texts attached to music like “dolce”,
“ritardando”, “molto espressivo”, “arco”, “V. S.”, …

> I don't see any particularly compelling reason to demand inclusion of 
> artifacts of sheet music such as the grouping of beams, when a rendering 
> program could easily determine the most typical grouping.
Have you played much classical music? Beam grouping often is used to show

1. Accents/heavy times/downbeats/beat grouping (I’m not sure about the
correct English term) in meters like 5/8, 8/8 (look f. e. at Bartók).
5/8 can be 2+3 or 3+2. And it can change in every measure.

2. Syncopations and shifted meter (look f. e. at Schumann).

3. (Often—but not always—in combination with double stems) an additional
voice made from a selection of many small notes in another voice (look
f. e. at Chopin or many other romantic piano composers).

> Unless you think we'll run out of square characters?
Let’s make a quick calculation: There are 46 printable ASCII characters
plus the space. So you have 47²=2209 possible “square characters”.
That’s less than “characters” in the chinese “alphabet” so not enough
for all purposes. Now to be fair look only at music: Maybe you don’t
need that many different characters for music encoding and even less
because you have different contexts. But many combinations of two random
characters don’t make sense, sometimes you need some redundancy to keep
something readable/understandable (even or computers!).

> It is a new project and I want to discuss it with people before afterthoughts 
> such as these are decided upon. The framework is solid, and like it or not, 
> this will proceed to become the plaintext music format.
You want to discuss but “like it or not: it’s perfect and will become
*the* standard”? That sounds very contradictory to me and to be honest
also a little bit megalomaniac/narcissistic.