>> Unless your "q:" field provides me with a way of DEFINING those strings >> in a musically intuitive way so that a numerical playback speed can be >> statically deduced from the musical text (e.g. by a playback program), >> there is no point in what you're suggesting. There are already about >> 10 different ways to put uninterpreted text into a tune header, we *do >> not* need another one. > The problem I have with the "definition" idea is that definitions are > only useful if you re-use the definition. If a term is defined at the > beginning of a tune, used once and then lost there is no point in > having it. This seems to be how written tempos are normally used.
No it isn't. A typical dance tune book will use "reel time" or "waltz tempo" the same way all through. In the Kurdish song book I quoted, the same Italian tempo terms are used over and over again and are NEVER defined at the beginning of a tune. There wouldn't be any point in tempo terms unless they had an understood meaning in a context wider than an individual tune. Today, everybody who has a metronome uses the commonest 8 or so Italian terms in the same way to about 1% precision because they're engraved on the scale, and I would guess the world contains a few million more metronome users than ABC users. A typical case where definitions need both to be shared among multiple tunes and also need to be easily redefinable: military marches. In some cases, British regiments have been using the same tunes to march to for 300 years. And they have usually had their tempi labelled the same way all that time: slow march, quickstep, retreat. But the numerical values of those tempi have risen steadily over the years, as soldiers have had better roads to march on and needed to carry less of their own equipment (the exact numbers are in period military manuals, and were insisted on; disagree with the RSM about the speed of a march and you could look forward to cleaning the parade ground with a toothbrush). And these terms have still faster definitions when the same tunes are used for country dances. So, if you've got a file of marches, and want to hear them as they might have been played in the American War of Independence or the Crimean War, it makes sense to just change the tempo definitions *once* at the start of the file and have *all* the tunes interpreted consistently. In the case of pipe band marches, each band today has its own set of tempi. There are ABC files out there with hundreds of marches. It's up to the pipe-major to decide the speed, NOT the tune transcriber, and it's a waste of the P-M's time if they have to go through the whole file and treat every tune as a special case. > It seems we haven't even agreed what the problem is. The problem is how to use textual descriptions of numerical playback speeds in ABC. > I think it will be difficult to agree on a solution. We've had quite a few variant proposals but they're mostly in the same ballpark regarding what they can express, most of the differences are merely syntactic. So I don't think this is going to be all that hard. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
