Hans Aberg wrote: > There is really a mixture of ideas. The relative notation should be > there in order to simplify input. There, I tend to think about the > melody line in a local region, rather than just related to the note > before. In tonal music, this note may often be the tonic then, but if > the melody crosses below it, one may need to shift region without > indices, simply because it is tiresome to writ them. So that is the > thinking about relative pitches. > > The other is just to use a numbering 0-9 to label the octaves (with 4 > being the middle one), used for indicating absolute pitches. This is > just a more modern system of the older that LilyPond. It is not new, > though: I have a book from 1975 using it, Robert Dick, "The other > flute". But thinking on it over some time, I start to think it is > quite convenient: just one symbol to indicate the octave. Then, if > such numbering should be used, it should not conflict with writing > chords and the like, therefore the prefix notation. I have extracted > this latter idea from some ideas I have on notating more general > scales and chords, where such notational conflicts also must be avoided.
It would be a very simple task for a programmer to write a preprocessor that would take notation in the syntax you describe and convert it to Lilypond in absolute notation. One fundamental difference between your proposed mixed relative and absolute notation (if a number is there, it's absolute; if the number is not there it's in the same octave as the last given note) is that Lilypond gives you a relative based on the previous note. This is very convenient for notating music, as you can ignore the octave except for two places -- at the start of a piece and when you have a jump of a fifth or more. Your proposed syntax would require a change of octave every time notes crossed an octave boundary, which can happen quite frequently in many keys. I suppose that it would be possible to introduce a third way of entering notes. But I wouldn't want to replace lilypond's current entry method with the one you've proposed. Carl Sorensen _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user