> I'm sure to be flamed for saying this, but I think that ABC is too
> strongly tied to the western 12-tone scale to bother trying to
> accomodate micro-tonal music. I believe that if we were to try,
> then the resulting "MT-ABC" would be too hard/cumbersome to use.
The proposal I put forward was for a large subclass of microtonal
musics, not everything that might be described that way: modes with
no more than seven notes to to the octave, so that the existing
ABC notenames could be used. This covers a vast range of idioms
already, from mediaeval Moorish lute music to the gamelan music of
south-east Asia. Extension to modes with more than seven notes is
mostly the same problem as that posed by the Western melodic minor
scale, which ABC already handles with no trouble.
The scheme I suggested requires the following bits:
- unit conversions between the pitch measurements found in each idiom
(cents, shrutis, commas, quartertones, numerical ratios and that's
it). BarFly already has this internally.
- a construct for naming a new mode and defining the pitches of those
seven notes within it (easily fits in one 80-column line). Again,
BarFly is nearly there with its alternate intonations.
- the ability to use the new mode in the same way as the existing ones.
The body of a tune notated in this scheme would be *indistinguishable*
from one written to present ABC standards, so it can't be that cumbersome.
And no existing ABC would need any change.
Staff-notation programs need a little more:
- a vocabulary of microtonal sharp and flat signs (these are fairly
standardized in Turkish music; a simpler scheme is used for modern
Arabic music) and layout rules for their use in key signatures
(again, a solved problem).
> I think trying to notate microtonal music in the 12-tone system is
> like trying to use metric wrenches on non-metric nuts
Turkish musicians have been using their adaptations of Western staff
notation for 200 years. Works fine.
> On the other hand, I WOULD like a mechanism for notating some of the
> small pitch variations I hear in Irish fiddle music.
The constructs required for this are exactly what I suggested for the
extension to allow microtonal accidentals or more-than-seven-note modes.
It might be useful to allow alternatives: simple fraction-of-a-semitone
accidentals written something like
^/2f
for "f a quartertone sharp", and user-defined accidentals for the more
refined things you get in Turkish music, which you could define in a
header field:
a:^4^ = + 4 comma
and use like
^4^f
Turkish music has six of these, all with standard signs: down or up one,
four or five commas. But whether there are standard staff-notation signs
for them is a secondary matter; I don't think Indian music has anything
comparable, but ABC can represent what it does just fine regardless, and
playback programs don't have to care.
The point of this scheme is to get something which is (a) achievable,
and (b) general enough to encode a useful amount of real music. You
can always think of some kind of microtonal idiom it won't cover, but
so what? There are plenty of diatonic idioms ABC can't cover either.
Success might be best measured by how many *unsatisfied* users it gets
(i.e. people committed to using it but still wanting more). We'd have
really made it if we got users beating on the developers for non-equally-
tempered shrutis, primary/secondary raga relationships, tetrachordal
construction, the Turkish double-24-note scale... but meanwhile how
about shipping something thay can be unhappy with?
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
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