On 2020/02/09 15:32:14, lilypond_ptoye.com wrote: > Surely "standard scale pitch or previously altered pitch". In D major: "cis c > cis" the first note is an alteration but not an accidental, the second is an > accidental but not an alteration, the third is both. Now I'm really splitting > hairs.
I read this as "In D major the note c _is_ an accidental". Or did you mean _has_ an accidental? > I'm beginning to think that this is all getting too theologial. I'm a practising > musician, not a theorist, and I raised the point as I'd never heard of > 'alteration' used in this rather technical sense. If people are happy with the > distinction let's just keep it and I withdraw my suggestion. Wait. If we try to improve the docs we need to care about best wordings, so that people speaking different language and with different musical education understand what we want to express. Furthermore we need to explain how we do things in LilyPond. Look at: mus = { \key d \major cis'4 } #(display-scheme-music (car (music-pitches mus))) #(display-scheme-music (ly:pitch-alteration (car (music-pitches mus)))) => (ly:make-pitch 0 0 1/2) 1/2 First how the cis is seen in LilyPond, second the alteration. (ofcourse no Accidental is printed in pdf) Do the same with note c and you see no alteration, i.e. 0 (ofcourse an Accidental is printed) Do similar with c and cis (and you see the alteration for cis again and an accidental for cis is printed) This is absolutely inline with my thinking. Though, c itself in D major can't be called an accidental. In my book an Accidental is always the printed ♯-sign or ♭-sign or natural or double-sharp/flat, nothing else, never the note itself. Furthermore in german we have the distinction between "Vorzeichen" and "Versetzungszeichen", in lilypond that would be the accidental-grobs from KeySignature and the additional "on the fly" Accidentals in music. I think it's worth the discussion. https://codereview.appspot.com/579280043/