Jack Campin writes:
>
>The R: field is long due for deprecation. There is no standard
>list of what rhythms it covers and what to do with them, and nobody
>seems interested in making it extensible in any way that would allow
>different users to agree on what their extensions mean. Why not
>just let it die so that the name can be reused for something more
>important and more definable?
>
Actually, it's used very effectively by Abcmus and (I think) a couple
of other player programs to give tunes the proper accent and swing. It
makes them a lot easier to listen to. It uses the tune type and meter to
figure out the primary and secondary beats for emphasis, and does things
with the relative length of notes to get closer to what a human might
play. If you replace R:hornpipe with R:reel in the header of a hornpipe,
it'll come out sounding like a reel (well, somewhat) and vice-versa.
The list of tune-types is user-extensible, and the style for each
tune-type can be defined in detail: you can adjust it to play the phrase
|ABcd| anywhere between straight and |A>Bc>d| (or, for military-style
bagpiping, even further). I'm sure you could set it up to play
middle-Eastern types too. This feature is designed for control of the
rhythm, and I don't think it's possible (yet) to use it to define
quarter-tone scales for specific tune-types, but I know there is support
for them somewhere in the program: I had a couple of tunes come out
sounding *very* strange: I was using a Q for some special purpose, and it
turned out Henrik had a default which made the notation QA play the A a
quarter-tone flat! So...hey! ask Henrik!
John Chambers writes,
>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.
>
Check out abcmus...
Cheers,
John
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