On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:55 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:
Thanks for a great overview about lyric spacing. One thing you didn't mention at all is how the rhythmic value of the note might affect spacing, particularly if there is a long syllable on a short note value, like "through" on a sixteenth. I seem to run into this an awful lot, and I can NEVER get a measure with this combination in it to look right, no matter what I do. Possibly this is because I don't really know what takes precedence over what.
Yes, that's the most basic problem, isn't it? I was thinking about that when I wrote before, but I guess I got sidetracked.
To a certain extent, there is no solution to this problem. Even if you're writing by hand, something's gotta give.
But Finale's default solution of making up ALL of the difference by adding space around the one problematic 16th note is no good. If there aren't also tight syllables on either side, there's probably some room already and it's just a matter of taking it. If one or both neighboring syllables are tight, I'll always push them each out at least a little bit. In my experience the eye comfortably tolerates a certain amount of lyric uncentering, so it's worth doing that to save some distortion in the music spacing. But of course the question is how much. That's a judgment call, which means it will be particularly hard to program into an algorithm. Even so, one ought to be able to build something around a table of weighting factors, with a reasonable default setting and the user able to manipulate the factors to taste.
The other important thing is to simply loosen that patch of music. I'll always consider moving a measure off the system so that the entire system is looser. If that doesn't work, I'll loosen the one measure at the expense of others in the system. (Again, how much is a judgment call.) And if that doesn't work, I still prefer to loosen one beat within the measure.
I've found that what the eye really rebels against in music spacing is if the beat itself is uneven -- if one 16th out of four gets too much space, or if the 16th gets too much space relative to the dotted 8th. If the entire beat is reasonably in proportion, that seems to satisfy the eye, even if the entire beat is somewhat looser than the music nearby.
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