>|> I've also found the phrase "explicit key signature" more useful than >|> "global accidentals", though I don't suppose that's a real big deal. >| These seem to me to be two separate things. Whem converted to >| conventional notation, an "explicit key signature" is the collection >| of sharps, naturals and flats you find at the start of the staff; >| "global accidentals" are accidentals applied to notes throughout the >| music. (Does anybody ever use these?)
What makes them hard to use is that you'd only do this if you had (a) figured out what the correct mode of the tune was, having gone right through it to see what pitches occurred, and (b) decided not to write it that way. There aren't many places where that happens. One Scottish tune that almost always seems to have been notated like that is "Tullochgorum", but I have no idea why it got singled out for this treatment. Something like it also happens in modal-magical- mystery-tour tunes where there's a gap in the scale for the earlier parts of the tune which is filled in later on with a different pitch than the one you might have expected - "Flowers of the Forest" is an example. For that it does make sense. >| I would like to propose the addition of two new optional parameters >| to the K: command; tonic= and mode=. Using these, John's K:Amix=g >| could become - >| K:^f^c=g tonic=A mode=mixolydian >| which seems much clearer to me. > If we were designing abc from scratch, I'd agree. As it is now, > I'd guess that few if any users would ever use this, mostly because > it's so much wordier. So I'd think that such clear but wordy > notation would be appropriate for the more complete notations like > MusicML or LilyPond, while ABC's "K:Amix=g" is more in keeping with > ABC's compact style. I have recently come to avoid abbreviations wherever possible, writing modes out with the full names. The reason I'm doing that is that on my CD-ROMs, most of the editorial documentation of the tunes is in the ABC headers; I don't repeat much of it in the explanatory text. Readers are going to have to bite the bullet and read the ABC directly if they want to know how I've changed key signatures or where I've inserted missing accidentals. So I can't be too cryptic. If Bryan's verbose alternative were available I'd use it every time. > ABC is compact and cryptic, but easy to type. Just about anything is easy to type if your editing environment has macros, auto-completion or cut & paste. Most people have some way to create chunks of stereotyped text faster than one-key-at-a-time. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
