Lukas P said:
> I'd be interested to learn the rationale behind these choices. Is the
> original proposal available anywhere?
Try:
http://viva.lib.virginia.edu/dmmc/Music/UnicodeMusic/
That's Perry Roland's original proposal, with a lot of examples. I'm not
sure you'll get much rationale, however, for the names.
Regarding yesterday's question by Patrik A.:
> 1) Where is the Gregorian punctum (square dot) ? Is it unified with another
> dot, another shaped note (U+1D147) ? If so, why ?
First, I believe what Patrik called "punctum", meaning the Gregorian
"brevis" (terminology according to Apel's Harvard Dict article "Notation".)
The (Gregorian) "brevis" (square) is unified with the square notehead
U+1D147; and the (Gregorian) "semi-brevis" (diamond or lozenge shape) is
unified with the U+1D1BA. Thus, Gregorian notation, medieval notation, and
modern notation require either separate fonts in practice, or need "font
features" to differentiate subtly different shapes if required.
Please note that the SCOPE of the current set of musical symbols is mainly
sufficient for general use in plain-text discussions and so forth. At
some point, there will probably be another proposal for more characters.
In particular, there might be a need for further neumes and more obscure
symbols. However, gregorian notation is expected to make heavy use of
ligatures, not all of which should be encoded. The quilisma in particular
I think needs to be added in a subsequent proposal.
Rick