Hi, As a composer/arranger I like Lilypond quite a lot, but a serious drawback for me that it isn't possible to write music with the (quite a lot used) turkish accidentals, I'm performing turkish music myself.
Up til now, Lilypond only supports two accidental-symbols mapping a quarter tone up and a quarter tone down. I read some mails on the mailinglists (by typing "turkish") e.g. and two major problems pop up : 1/ quite some accidentals which are used by eastern musicians cannot be engraved yet. Turkish classical music needs five types of flats and five types of sharps. Arabic classical music uses some of these symbols used by the turkish community, but these accidentals have a different meaning. Iranian musicians use other accidentals (triangle-like accidentals : e.g. the koron). Turkish folk musicians need accidentals with a numer above (just like a power function in math) : si-bemol^{2} and si-bemol^{3} where the number indicates how many commas (a comma being 1/53rd of an octave). 2/ with this plethora of symbols and meanings, quite a lot of difficulties arise when wanting to map one of these accidentals to a tuning. A typical example is arabic classical music where musicians from different countries play the same piece of music from the same composer with the same score with the same accidentals, yet their tuning of the "quarter tones" differs. In order to keep things practical, I think it would be a great step forward if these accidentals would be engravable without worrying about the tuning, that is, as a first step. I saw that many people on the lists wanted to combine midi-tuning and implementation of accidentals right away, I think the problem is too complicated. Unless you let the user decide what the meaning of an accidental is (e.g. by typing eseh35 instead of eseh, which could mean a quartertone lowering 35 cents). Greetings, Gunther _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user