Square characters

[have]

To explain the concept of a square character, let's look at a separate project to mine: the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is used by dictionaries and the like to unambiguously describe how to pronounce any word in any language. It has a symbol for every sound your mouth can conceivably make.

But that's more sounds than there are letters in the alphabet. The response of the Association was to add more glyphs. I think that in an age of Unicode we have just as many glyphs as we need right now, thank you very much - and I despise alt codes and the dreaded Character Map.

 

A long time ago, the Romans had a problem of running out of numerals when their numbers got too big. The Arabs responded by creating the numeral system we use today that doesn't need more symbols than 0 through 9.

 

That's basically what I'm doing to the International Phonetic Alphabet - we want more sounds than there are letters in A through Z - so we don't add more letters, we simply square them, declaring individual characters to be irrelevant except as halves of pairs of characters, or 'squares'. Now I can represent every letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet with two strokes of the keyboard everyone has - because CC isn't CS isn't SC isn't SS. It's a side project of mine that also uses square characters, and may even prove useful in a parallel format - but I am only a lay phonetician, and that square alphabet is not finished enough to present.

 

It goes to show that there is at least one application of a (parallel) square alphabet besides premusic, which likely implies there's more. It's a very powerful format that merits an optimized text editor environment.

 

Viral Anticapital

http://anti.capital

 

 

--------- Original Message ---------

Subject: Re: What can Premusic do that others can't?
From: "Jacques Menu Muzhic" <address@hidden>
Date: 3/20/17 6:42 pm
To: address@hidden
Cc: "Jacques Menu Muzhic" <address@hidden>, "Lilypond User List" <address@hidden>, "David Kastrup" <address@hidden>

Hello Have,

 

I don’t understand what you mean by square characters: can you make that more clear?

 

There are text editors you can use I guess for the parallel aspect of what seems to be a measure-wise notation IIUC, i.e. those that offer block-mode editing such as Win-EDT on Windows.

 

There’s a tree structure in nearly all music, written or played: parts are performed in parallel, each of them made of voices. The latter usually get grouped into staves for reading and organisation commodity, and repeats, da capos and codas add more structure to that. An organ music score is an example of such a tree.

 

All text notations used to represent trees have a difficult problem. MusicXML is not meant to be used by composers or music aficionados, it is an exchange format designed for use by computer applications. The order of the various markups such as <part-list/> and <part-list/> is defined by a DTD.

 

In the example below, the <note/> contains the sharp <accidental/>, but the <p /> dynamic occurs before it. It could have been placed inside the <note/> too, though. Such design choices were not made at random, there are reasons behind them.

 

      <direction placement="below">

        <direction-type>

          <dynamics>

            <p />

          </dynamics>

        </direction-type>

      </direction>

      <note>

        <pitch>

          <step>C</step>

          <alter>1</alter>

          <octave>4</octave>

        </pitch>

        <duration>16</duration>

        <voice>1</voice>

        <type>half</type>

        <accidental>sharp</accidental>

      </note>

 

In this other example, there’s a partgroup containing two parts, one for each flute, with respective parts « 1 » and « 2 » sharing a single staff as is often the case in orchestral scores. 

 

    </part-group>

    <score-part id="P2">

      <part-name>Flutes</part-name>

      <part-abbreviation>Fl.</part-abbreviation>

      <score-instrument id="P2-I19">

        <instrument-name>Fl.</instrument-name>

      </score-instrument>

      <midi-instrument id="P2-I19">

        <midi-channel>2</midi-channel>

        <midi-program>74</midi-program>

      </midi-instrument>

    </score-part>

    <part-group number="2" type="stop"/>

    <part-group number="2" type="start">

      <group-name>1

2</group-name>

      <group-barline>yes</group-barline>

    </part-group>

 

And the horns sections is a sub-partgroup in this score, with 4 voices grouped into two staves. MusicXML precisely is weird in this area BTW: it does not represent a staff group (tree of groups) as a tree, by allows for « intelaced groups », which is arguable:

 

 

How do you represent such complex structures with Premusic?

 

JM