On 19 Feb 2006 at 12:21, Chuck Israels wrote: > There are times that I think reducing the staff size and increasing > the amount of white space around staves and other objects actually > might make the music more legible.
I'm presently struggling with a chronic eye problem (uveitis) that at times greatly reduces my visual acuity (my ability to find typos is vastly reduced, too, so you may have noticed less accurate typing at times during the last few months), and I've noticed a number of things about notating music that makes a big difference. 1. always make the space between systems larger than the space between staves within a system. Of course, this only matters when reading from score, or from a grand staff, but it's a huge thing. Last week my viol consort was reading some music that was from hand- written parts on garden-variety music paper. Thus, the staves (12 to a page in systems of 3 each) were all a uniform distance apart. I had difficulty finding the next system because of this. 2. there is a non-obvious relationship between size and spacing. At smaller sizes, looser music spacing makes the music more legible. At large sizes, tight music spacing can be very problematic. 3. white space is not helpful when the basic note size is small. I see lots of scores that have very small noteheads, but huge amounts of space between staves and systems. This space would be much better used (and more readable) if the note size were larger. 4. parts prepared by photcopying from a cut up score are *extremely* hard to read (something we in our consort have to deal with a lot, because much of the repertory we play is not available as printed parts, only in socre), because the horizontal note spacing is inaccurate, since it was set in a context that accounted for the contents of the other parts. The result is that, with my reduced vision, I often mistake a quarter note for a half note (and vice versa), because in the score it was given as much horizontal space as an adjacent half note. This is not really an issue with Finale, but it does show that for a part, beat or time signature spacing may be better, since the eye working with reduced acuity reads the note values in part by looking at relative horizontal space allocated to adjacent notes. 5. make sure your accidentals aren't unnaturally small. I think Finale's are just fine, but lots of editions we play from use accidentals that are relatively smaller than what Finale produces. This results in the reader like me seeing a B with an accidental, but having to guess whether to play a B flat or a B natural (the same with cadential-figure leading tones, not just B flats). 6. don't make your editorial "ficta" so small that they are unreadable. When my eyes are acting up, the little editorial accidentals above the notes basically get ignored -- even if I see them, they are too small for me to tell what they are. On the other hand, I find that most of the editions we play from are much too prone to suggesting these editorial accidentals than they should be, so the result is often more correct than if I played the editorial accidental. 7. the Finale fonts that have half and whole noteheads that are larger than the filled noteheads are a very good thing. They have two benefits for me when my eyes are acting up: a. I can distinguish a half and a quarter note by size even when I can't tell if the half is filled in. b. the larger empty noteheads leave more room so that lines through them to not tend to look like a filled-in notehead. That is, there are fewer cases of type a), where the half notes look filled in (because of the line through them). Not being able to tell placement on lines/spaces is one of the worst problems for me, and it is aggravated by music fonts that use small open noteheads. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
