Re: time signature question

[Hans Aberg]

On 26 Feb 2012, at 20:06, David Kastrup wrote:

>>> this is almost cute enough for a bounty:
>> 
>> It works exactly as I had hoped.
>> What's a reasonable fee for your effort?
> 
> Hard to say.  Writing this up now was good for about €18 (5 minutes was
> a bit boastful as an estimate, even though this went through without
> major puzzlers).  If you want to show your appreciation that I was
> responsible for a lot of the infrastructure actually turning this into a
> straightforward job, you can take your pick of either
> 
> a) doubling the amount
> 
> b) creating and "issueing" a nice snippet from it (probably using
>   something like \repeat unfold 7 c'8. or so as a somewhat more
>   illustrative content) and going through all the motions until it has
>   made its way into the LilyPond documentation.
> 
> I think that this code would make for a nice snippet.  It exercises a
> fair bit of functionality without major distractions in between.

It would be nice if it would make it into the LilyPond distribution.

The snippet is equivalent to
  \time 21/16
  \set beatStructure = #'(3 3 3 3 3 3 3)
and then set time signature style (which I think possibly is called "visual"). 
(Just count sequences of equal notes, and put a count number above.)

If there in the future is an extension to more complex meters, this style would 
fit nicely. WP says that though only few composers use it, it is more common in 
music education.

Carl Orff, in Carmina Burana, actually wrote it with a slash "/" above, once 
for the whole orchestral score. Also, for some reason, in the music, he write 
the stems always to the right, for some reason, but it is not typeset that way.

As for other styles, one might just write the 21/16 and let the beaming tell 
the metric grouping, but a nice variation someone here had was to write the 
decomposition above the time signature. In this case, this would have been the 
"+" notation 3+3+3+3+3+3+3, which tends to be long. So this "visual" style 
might be used here, too.

Hans