The attitude that I take in Muse is that Muse does beaming automatically, so I disregard the beaming information in the ABC. I can argue both sides of this, but the argument for this action is that fundamentally ABC is about describing the music, not the printed page. What Muse does is to *translate* ABC into staff notation and in doing so makes a great many decisions (relative spacing of notes, margins, vertical alignment of the different voices, how far apart and how thick to draw the lines of the staff, how thick are leger lines, etc. etc. and finally, which notes to beam. In fact I've just been rewriting the beaming engine in Muse and it seems to me that trying to express beaming in ABC in all but the simplest cases is impossible.
For instance consider even [GB]A and I want the G and A to be beamed but the B to be a separate flag. Or if you think you can solve that one ( perhaps [B G]A ) then how about [BG] [AF] and I want the B to be beamed with the A, tails up and the G with the F, tails down. It can get much, much worse than this. Get a Messiah choral score and look at the accompianist's(*) part for "Surely He hath borne our griefs". A solution is probably to use V: and recognise that these are separate voices (and Frank, for one, can supply very complex examples). In general I think the attitude of programs should be that where the ABC cannot be directly expressed in the new notation it is to be *translated* into some equivalent. In just the same way, when translating English into American "don't play the fool" goes across directly but "stop buggering about" doesn't and "let's table this proposal" needs a complete rewrite. So, yes. A4- AA or perhaps A4-A A Laurie (*) It started as a misprint, but was too good to waste. ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, June 24, 2002 4:43 AM Subject: [abcusers] Question about rhythm notation How should a program handle this: M:3/4 L:1/4 A5 A| ... I think what the author was intending was: A4- AA| but since there is no '1/2 dot' in music that I know of, there is really no note head that corresponds to A5. Since beaming in ABC is defined by the music and not the program, I had taken this to mean that a single note should correspond to a note with a single beam. In the A5 case it was pretty obvious what to do, but in the more general case, is there something that ABC defines, or people expect to happen, when the note duration explicitly specified doesn't correspond to a known note length? Thanks for the input, Aaron To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
