Jack sez:
| except that hornpipes aren't always played dotted. You would need
| yet *another* level of extra information to say the style you're
| using is one where this dotted interpretation is appropriate.
...
| And some of the rhythmic types found in folk music are unimplementable
| by any playback software. A slow strathspey is intrinsically a form
| where the player is *expected* to do their own thing with the rhythm.
| They are only ever played solo. What is a MIDI program supposed to do
| with this? Rubato driven by a random number generator?
This is true only if you're expecting an abc player to produce
beautiful music. But this misses an important use of such players: A
number of musicians who prefer to learn tunes by ear like to feed abc
to a player, preferably in a "loop" mode, to learn the tune. Such
people don't want any cleverness or randomness from the music. A
"mechanical" version that is the same every time is just fine for
their purposes. They are only trying to get the notes into their
heads, after all, and then they will do their own interpreting.
For such people, recognizing "R:hornpipe" or "R:shottish" (in all its
variant spellings ;-) and playing the notes in a 3:2 or 2:1 ration is
fine, and helps them get the basic feel into their fingers. The same
would apply to a strathspey, which could be played exactly, or the
dotted notes could be "overdotted" to match the style. But doing this
mechanically and the same every time isn't a problem; it's useful for
the person learning by ear.
Something that I've thought could be useful in a player: People using
them to learn tunes could benefit from a basic sort of "style" list
that would modify tunes to fit a style. The point here would be to do
the standard, stereotypical things of that style. It's not a tool for
producing masterful music without human intervention; it's a tool for
helping novices learn the basics of a style. Most musical styles have
a lot of things that are conventionally done, often without the
musicians being very aware of what they're doing. Incorporating such
things into a player could lead to a good teaching tool.
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