Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Urs Liska]

Hi Malte,

Am 27.04.19 um 10:49 schrieb Malte Meyn:



Am 26.04.19 um 14:45 schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser:


I might also be willing to use LaTeX for the creation of the symbols 
because I could then combine efforts for a standalone LaTeX package 
to produce the symbols in continuous text too.


I'd very much argue for a LilyPond-only solution in order to rely as 
little as possible on a specific toolchain.


As said before 
(https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2019-04/msg00344.html) 
I already made a LilyPond-only solution that I abandoned because it 
wasn’t easy to include in LaTeX, see attachment.



That looks really great, and it's a pity you abandoned it. But I can of 
course understand your rationale. However, as impressive as your 
font-based approach is, I would really prefer having a package that does 
it "live", i.e. does the combination of sub-symbols while engraving or 
typesetting. That will provide much more flexibility on the long run, as 
it is possible to create new or custom functionality without having to 
modify a rather "opaque" object like a font. And I will definitely want 
to have the symbols in arbitrary fonts. Now, having the experience 
through lyluatex that my music examples automatically have the same text 
fonts as the surrounding text document, I would never again accept music 
examples with LilyPond's default text fonts in my documents, and I'm 
sure this will go for analysis symbols as well (or, if I want them to be 
in a different font, I'd probably want to *choose* that font freely).


Although I know that keeping two projects in parallel is a serious 
maintenance issue I think the best path forward (at least from my 
perspective and not at all ruling out a font-based approach in parallel) 
is creating a LilyPond-based solution, make that as generic as possible 
and then think about a way for LaTeX. What would definitely work is 
basically rebuilding that LilyPond solution (with a matching user 
interface) as an independent LaTeX package. Maybe it would even be 
possible to use lyluatex (and its option to integrate LilyPond snippets 
directly in the continuous text) to have LilyPond engrave the symbols 
on-the-fly and essentially find a way to *integrate* the LilyPond 
solution in LaTeX that way. (This is also why I basically decided not to 
do any further work on my lilyglyphs package, since lyluatex essentially 
can to the same and much more, with the only downside of requiring 
LilyPond (and *lua*tex) to be available.) Such an approach would either 
be a standalone package or an addition to lyluatex where a special 
command would wrap the \lilypond{} command to generate a custom file 
around the given commands to generate a single analysis symbol or a 
sequence thereof. Actually I think that should be rather simple (with 
the single drawback that it would be LuaLaTeX-only solution).


Best
Urs


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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Urs Liska]

Hi Lukas and all,

Am 26.04.19 um 23:15 schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser:

Hi,


but I have to some degree lost track of
much of the discussion of the last 20 years, and when I actively worked
with that kind of written harmonic analysis (while at the
Musikhochschule) I didn't have much of a scholarly mind-set. So in 
fact.

I was *not* aware of all this...

at the Musikhochschule Mannheim, we were only taught some basic roman
numeral stuff. IMO, that's a shame. Now being a high school teacher, 
I know

what I was missing back then.
OK, enough complaining...  ;-)


If this was a "Schulmusik" course (music education for aspiring high 
school teachers), at least your instructors probably could assume a 
fairly even-distributed amount and flavour of prerequisites in the 
participants, so it was easy for them: They could simply teach the 
style the liked most :-). Not that I would endorse this...


(I'd be interested in what you're missing and at which point in your 
high school teaching you feel the need for the respective harmonic 
analysis tools, but maybe that's a matter for a private conversation.)


In my teaching for students majoring in their respective instruments, 
I almost always have very international classes, and I make a habit of 
letting them explain to me the way they learned harmony in their 
respective home countries. The general tendency seems to be that in 
most countries, roman numerals are used (with differences with respect 
to whether there's an upper-/lowercase distinction and how inversions 
are being expressed - IIb vs. II6 vs. ii6 and so on), and that people 
from German-speaking countries have either i) no previous knowledge at 
all or ii) are acquainted with "German" (Malerian) function symbols. 
But there's lots of other variants - a student from China once showed 
me "his" symbols that were something like S ii 56 (hence, combining 
functional analysis, roman numeral and figured bass symbols in one 
huge symbol), and someone from the Baltic states showed my a flavour 
of "Riemannian" functional symbols with lots of juxtapositions ("ST" 
with strikethrough) that I never saw anywhere else...



I think the problem with most students' (and of course also scholars') 
point of view is that many (most?) people don't consider the system they 
grew up with as what it is: an (one out of many) attempt at 
rationalizing musical reality in an analytical system. Each of these 
systems has their pros and cons, and most systems are tailored to 
specific repertoires against which they were developed. In my experience 
people from the "German" fraction look down to the roman numerals 
because they seem like mere descriptions without interpretation of the 
harmony's "functional" relation to the surrounding music. Seen from the 
other side functional analysis suffers from *pretending* such a clear 
functional relation to be present and tangible.





Back to topic: I think it would be a reasonable first step to try and 
get an overview of some important existing variaties of analysis 
symbols and try to decide which of them should be supported in what 
way. This is a project I'd volunteer to be involved in - but I warn 
that, at least in Germany, each author tends to invent his/her special 
symbols...




Having followed this conversation that I started I came to the 
conclusion that I would like to see a new module in openLilyLib's 
`analysis` package (complementing `arrows` and `frames`). In order to be 
generally useful this would have to have the following features:


 * Provide a reasonable set of "major modes" (e.g. roman numerals vs.
   Malerian function symbols)
 * Of course provide a convenient input syntax
 * Be configurable in detail, e.g. let the user either choose or design
   the style of strikethrough, or the exact positioning of double
   characters.
 * Be extensible to allow custom extensions or custom symbols to be
   integrated

I would vote for a LilyPond-based solution, with markups and/or stencil 
overrides (or probably both), with the expressed intent to provide a 
parallel development for LaTeX. I'll comment on that separately.


In order to be useful I agree that it should start with collecting and 
discussing the styles one might need to address, only then can we 
reasonably think about how the basic coverage and the extensibility 
should be structured.


I'm not fully clear about the best way this discussion should be 
structured, but probably the best *place* is 
https://github.com/openlilylib/analysis, the issue tracker, maybe the 
Wiki?, and a "project" I've created 
(https://github.com/openlilylib/analysis/projects/1). This discussion 
should definitely not be limited to the LilyPond community and mailing 
list, so when we have an initial place it would be good to reach out to 
other communities, which will provide us with valuable input - and at 
the same time give an opportunity to engage with these communities and 
have them talk about LilyPond ...


One personal 

Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi,


but I have to some degree lost track of
much of the discussion of the last 20 years, and when I actively worked
with that kind of written harmonic analysis (while at the
Musikhochschule) I didn't have much of a scholarly mind-set. So in fact.
I was *not* aware of all this...

at the Musikhochschule Mannheim, we were only taught some basic roman
numeral stuff. IMO, that's a shame. Now being a high school teacher, I know
what I was missing back then.
OK, enough complaining...  ;-)


If this was a "Schulmusik" course (music education for aspiring high 
school teachers), at least your instructors probably could assume a 
fairly even-distributed amount and flavour of prerequisites in the 
participants, so it was easy for them: They could simply teach the style 
the liked most :-). Not that I would endorse this...


(I'd be interested in what you're missing and at which point in your 
high school teaching you feel the need for the respective harmonic 
analysis tools, but maybe that's a matter for a private conversation.)


In my teaching for students majoring in their respective instruments, I 
almost always have very international classes, and I make a habit of 
letting them explain to me the way they learned harmony in their 
respective home countries. The general tendency seems to be that in most 
countries, roman numerals are used (with differences with respect to 
whether there's an upper-/lowercase distinction and how inversions are 
being expressed - IIb vs. II6 vs. ii6 and so on), and that people from 
German-speaking countries have either i) no previous knowledge at all or 
ii) are acquainted with "German" (Malerian) function symbols. But 
there's lots of other variants - a student from China once showed me 
"his" symbols that were something like S ii 56 (hence, combining 
functional analysis, roman numeral and figured bass symbols in one huge 
symbol), and someone from the Baltic states showed my a flavour of 
"Riemannian" functional symbols with lots of juxtapositions ("ST" with 
strikethrough) that I never saw anywhere else...



Back to topic: I think it would be a reasonable first step to try and 
get an overview of some important existing variaties of analysis symbols 
and try to decide which of them should be supported in what way. This is 
a project I'd volunteer to be involved in - but I warn that, at least in 
Germany, each author tends to invent his/her special symbols...


Lukas


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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Klaus Blum]

Hi everybody, 


Urs Liska-3 wrote
> but I have to some degree lost track of 
> much of the discussion of the last 20 years, and when I actively worked 
> with that kind of written harmonic analysis (while at the 
> Musikhochschule) I didn't have much of a scholarly mind-set. So in fact. 
> I was *not* aware of all this...

at the Musikhochschule Mannheim, we were only taught some basic roman
numeral stuff. IMO, that's a shame. Now being a high school teacher, I know
what I was missing back then. 
OK, enough complaining...  ;-)

I'm happy if that snippet can be useful for other people. Unfortunately,
it's not very user-friendly because all I can handle is ordinary markup
functions with ordinary parameters. 
However, Urs has so often succeeded in finding reasonable interfaces for
stuff like that. If I can help, please let me know. 

I remeber having re-written some of the functions adding a check for empty
string parameters. IIRC that was to prevent different results between pdf
and svg output. So this should be the most recent code that I can offer: 
TonsatzDef.ily
  

I'd be glad to help turning that into another OLL module. 

Cheers, 
Klaus



--
Sent from: http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/User-f3.html

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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Malte Meyn]

Hi Urs, Lukas, and everybody,

Am 26.04.19 um 14:45 schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser:
And @Malte, am I wrong if I remember that I saw some work on functional 
analysis symbols done by you?


that’s true. For my thesis I needed such symbols for use both in LaTeX 
and LilyPond. I had made a LilyPond solution that uses a lot of string 
magic and markup functions but wasn’t able to include that into LaTeX. 
So then I decided I would need a software-independent solution and tried 
OpenType magic. The result is a font that I can use in LilyPond, LaTeX, 
LibreOffice, and other programs that support OpenType features. The 
current state is only a proof of concept without proper documentation 
and without really knowing whether I’ve done the OpenType magic 
correctly. But it’s been good enough for my needs so far. You can find 
it at https://github.com/mmeyn/Riemann. For usage, have a look at 
http://notat.io/viewtopic.php?f=4=403.


I’d very much like to improve that solution and make it more 
feature-complete, better usable, and less hacky. But that would probably 
need some expertise on OpenType and fonts in general.


Cheers,
Malte

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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Urs Liska]

For the record, I've created sort-of a Wiki for the `analysis` 
openLilyLib package, so you can see what Klaus has created:


https://github.com/openlilylib/analysis/wiki


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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Urs,

> I'm in need of symbols for harmonic analysis (in about the Riemann flavour). 
> I would go for it by creating a lyrics-like context for the horizontal and 
> vertical alignment and produce some functions that would create combined 
> markups or stencils for the symbols. Additional challenges would be to define 
> practical ways to use something like stanzas for modulations and boxes around 
> that (a sample image attached).

That’s the path I took for the engravings I was recently hired to make for the 
Intégral journal. Here are a few screenshots:

Ex. 1

Ex. 2


Ex. 3

Of course, I didn’t need symbols as fancy as yours… but I definitely think this 
is your best and most flexible path forward.

Seems like this would make a great OLL module, no? If I can help, let me know.

Best,
Kieren.



Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info 
‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info 

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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Urs Liska]

Hi Lukas,

Am 26.04.19 um 14:45 schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser:

Hi Urs,

finally I'm in need of symbols for harmonic analysis (in about the 
Riemann flavour).


Just to provide some context to this request (of course, I assume you 
are perfectly aware of all this): 



It's somewhat painful to admit but I have to some degree lost track of 
much of the discussion of the last 20 years, and when I actively worked 
with that kind of written harmonic analysis (while at the 
Musikhochschule) I didn't have much of a scholarly mind-set. So in fact. 
I was *not* aware of all this...



The style of harmonic analysis is quite different from any of the many 
flavours Hugo Riemann proposed originally. Rather, in incorporates 
fundamental changes established by later German-speaking authors, most 
importantly Reger, Grabner and Maler. (To name but a few: The 
abandoning of Riemann's dualistic approach to minor keys, the 
upper-/lowercase distinction for major/minor sonorities, the 
designation of inversions by giving the bass note relative to the 
root, the notion of 'Gegenklang' instead of Riemanns 
'Leittonwechselklang' etc.)


But what's important is that the exact style in used in Urs's example 
became quasi-standard in German-speaking countries in the second half 
of the 20th century, and apparently it still is so, at least for 
highschool/undergraduate level. 



As far as I've heard in recent years, there have been significant 
developments in that area over the last two decades, and it seems in 
current music theory (in the silly German distinction between "music 
theory" and "musicology") that "Riemann"-style analysis is mostly being 
considered pretty much outdated and too schematic to reflect actual 
musical reality.



(I'm often amazed in my music theory classes at German/Austrian music 
universities when some alternative descriptions of sonorities such as 
vii°6, ii65 or a French Sixth are quite often only very reluctantly 
accepted by the German-speaking students who state they learned the 
"real" explanation, i.e. Maler-style functional analysis, at school.)



Oh, yes, the "real" understanding ROFL.




To wit, Urs's request is probably shared by lots of users from 
Germany/Austria. (I, for one, never needed them in Lilypond until this 
year, at which occasion I used the LSR snippet that Harm already 
pointed you to).


I'd very much be interested in discussing questions of design, 
interface, variants-to-be-supported etc. for this. 



I was first surprised and then not at all to see that the LSR snippet 
was created by Klaus Blum - who has also provided amazing stuff with 
boxes and arrows, now available in the openLilyLib 'analysis' package 
(https://github.com/openlilylib/analysis) - which is also the place a 
more comprehensive solution for harmonic analysis.


This should indeed include much more than the exact style I am currently 
looking for, although creating a package that provides multiple basic 
'styles' and substantial configuration options seems pretty challenging. 
But I'd say it would warrant a kind of "working group" because I think 
together with Klaus' existing analysis tools and my 'scholarly' package 
we have the foundation to provide pretty much a killer toolkit for 
academic purposes, and I'd be more than happy to increase its coverage 
and consequentially (hopefully) impact.



One might probably learn a lot from David Nalesnik's excellent roman 
numeral analysis tool 
(https://github.com/davidnalesnik/lilypond-roman-numeral-tool). I 
imagine that matters will probably be more complicated than with roman 
numerals, but at least for these, David implemented an ingenious 
syntax and layout engine.



I'll have a look at that too. Roman numeral analysis should of course 
also be merged into a comprehensive package.





And @Malte, am I wrong if I remember that I saw some work on 
functional analysis symbols done by you?


I would go for it by creating a lyrics-like context for the 
horizontal and vertical alignment and produce some functions that 
would create combined markups or stencils for the symbols. 
Additional challenges would be to define practical ways to use 
something like stanzas for modulations and boxes around that (a 
sample image attached).
Stanzas are ideal for indicating key regions (I use them regularly for 
roman numeral analysis). As for the boxes, this probably needs some 
new kind of interface.


The "frames" module in the "analysis" package already provides something 
that should be usable for that (see attached image).


One thing I'm a bit worried about is that when changing the harmonic 
region I would prefer having a solution that works like \change Staff = 
"" (well, ideally it should not depend on an existing context but 
*create* it on the fly) so I don't have to provide skips in the second 
layer/stanza.




I might also be willing to use LaTeX for the creation of the symbols 
because I could then combine efforts for a standalone LaTeX package 
to 

Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi Urs,

finally I'm in need of symbols for harmonic analysis (in about the 
Riemann flavour).


Just to provide some context to this request (of course, I assume you 
are perfectly aware of all this): The style of harmonic analysis is 
quite different from any of the many flavours Hugo Riemann proposed 
originally. Rather, in incorporates fundamental changes established by 
later German-speaking authors, most importantly Reger, Grabner and 
Maler. (To name but a few: The abandoning of Riemann's dualistic 
approach to minor keys, the upper-/lowercase distinction for major/minor 
sonorities, the designation of inversions by giving the bass note 
relative to the root, the notion of 'Gegenklang' instead of Riemanns 
'Leittonwechselklang' etc.)


But what's important is that the exact style in used in Urs's example 
became quasi-standard in German-speaking countries in the second half of 
the 20th century, and apparently it still is so, at least for 
highschool/undergraduate level. (I'm often amazed in my music theory 
classes at German/Austrian music universities when some alternative 
descriptions of sonorities such as vii°6, ii65 or a French Sixth are 
quite often only very reluctantly accepted by the German-speaking 
students who state they learned the "real" explanation, i.e. Maler-style 
functional analysis, at school.)


To wit, Urs's request is probably shared by lots of users from 
Germany/Austria. (I, for one, never needed them in Lilypond until this 
year, at which occasion I used the LSR snippet that Harm already pointed 
you to).


I'd very much be interested in discussing questions of design, 
interface, variants-to-be-supported etc. for this. One might probably 
learn a lot from David Nalesnik's excellent roman numeral analysis tool 
(https://github.com/davidnalesnik/lilypond-roman-numeral-tool). I 
imagine that matters will probably be more complicated than with roman 
numerals, but at least for these, David implemented an ingenious syntax 
and layout engine.


And @Malte, am I wrong if I remember that I saw some work on functional 
analysis symbols done by you?


I would go for it by creating a lyrics-like context for the 
horizontal and vertical alignment and produce some functions that 
would create combined markups or stencils for the symbols. Additional 
challenges would be to define practical ways to use something like 
stanzas for modulations and boxes around that (a sample image attached).
Stanzas are ideal for indicating key regions (I use them regularly for 
roman numeral analysis). As for the boxes, this probably needs some new 
kind of interface.


I might also be willing to use LaTeX for the creation of the symbols 
because I could then combine efforts for a standalone LaTeX package to 
produce the symbols in continuous text too.


I'd very much argue for a LilyPond-only solution in order to rely as 
little as possible on a specific toolchain.


Lukas



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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Urs Liska]

Hi Harm,

Am 26.04.19 um 13:47 schrieb Thomas Morley:

Am Fr., 26. Apr. 2019 um 13:30 Uhr schrieb Urs Liska :

Hi all,

finally I'm in need of symbols for harmonic analysis (in about the
Riemann flavour). I would go for it by creating a lyrics-like context
for the horizontal and vertical alignment and produce some functions
that would create combined markups or stencils for the symbols.
Additional challenges would be to define practical ways to use something
like stanzas for modulations and boxes around that (a sample image
attached).

I might also be willing to use LaTeX for the creation of the symbols
because I could then combine efforts for a standalone LaTeX package to
produce the symbols in continuous text too.

But before going down that road I wanted to ask if someone else can
point me either to existing code or to a better approach ...

Thanks
Urs

Hi Urs,

there's
http://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=967



Thank you for the pointer.



Not sure whether it fits all your needs, though.



Probably not (can't look into it *right now*), but will definitely 
provide me with sufficient fundamentals (pun intended) to get started.


Best
Urs



Cheers,
   Harm


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Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Thomas Morley]

Am Fr., 26. Apr. 2019 um 13:30 Uhr schrieb Urs Liska :
>
> Hi all,
>
> finally I'm in need of symbols for harmonic analysis (in about the
> Riemann flavour). I would go for it by creating a lyrics-like context
> for the horizontal and vertical alignment and produce some functions
> that would create combined markups or stencils for the symbols.
> Additional challenges would be to define practical ways to use something
> like stanzas for modulations and boxes around that (a sample image
> attached).
>
> I might also be willing to use LaTeX for the creation of the symbols
> because I could then combine efforts for a standalone LaTeX package to
> produce the symbols in continuous text too.
>
> But before going down that road I wanted to ask if someone else can
> point me either to existing code or to a better approach ...
>
> Thanks
> Urs

Hi Urs,

there's
http://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=967

Not sure whether it fits all your needs, though.

Cheers,
  Harm

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Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

finally I'm in need of symbols for harmonic analysis (in about the 
Riemann flavour). I would go for it by creating a lyrics-like context 
for the horizontal and vertical alignment and produce some functions 
that would create combined markups or stencils for the symbols. 
Additional challenges would be to define practical ways to use something 
like stanzas for modulations and boxes around that (a sample image 
attached).


I might also be willing to use LaTeX for the creation of the symbols 
because I could then combine efforts for a standalone LaTeX package to 
produce the symbols in continuous text too.


But before going down that road I wanted to ask if someone else can 
point me either to existing code or to a better approach ...


Thanks
Urs

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