Jack Campin writes: | >> Something I've also implemented is the conventional |:: ... ::| | >> notation that says "three times through". ... | In music I've seen that uses this construct, it's represented by | printing "(3x)" above the staff. A staff-notation generator could | do whatever it liked with "|:: ... ::|", but I suspect that most | non-Scandiwegian users would be happier with some such explicit | representation using honest-to-god numerals.
Yeah; I've seen that, too. OTOH, I've seen the |::: ... :::| notation used a fair amount in music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and even musicians who claim not to have seen the notation before always seem to know what it means without explanation. I don't thing I've ever seen it used for more than 3 repeats (four times through). It would get difficult to count. One problem with using "(3x)" is that this looks a lot like a strange chord symbol to software. Maybe it should be "^(3x)". | Does any system of notation have a sign for "repeat this bit as often | as you feel like"? The definitive use of that is in Terry Riley's | "In C", but it occurs implicitly in quite a few genres. In fact, this happens in Scandinavian and German folk dance. It's usually tied in with a dance that has two different steps that match the music (e.g., zwiefacher). There are some tunes that are often played with irregular repeats, to see if the dancers can handle it. A slightly simpler version, for non-expert dancers, would do something like an arithmetic progression, playing the phrase N times in the Nth time through the dance, or something like that. All the notation I've seen for this has been idiosyncratic. And often in German or Swedish or Finnish. Some years back, Scientific American published the "Telnet Song" that had nested for-loops as the repeat indicators. It was a cute song that described the escape sequences required to back out gracefully from a chain of telnet connections without leaving any dangling connections alive on any of the machines. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
