Re: Repeated durations: pitches vs rests

[David Bellows]

Hey Martin,

> it’s best that softwares that produce Lilypond files don’t use any kind of 
> shortcuts, they should write everything explicitly (and in absolute mode) 
> instead.

Your advice is excellent. Shortcuts like this probably have finicky
lives and if something more important comes along that breaks it, then
it will stay broken and I'll have to deal with this again anyway.

> I’ll just agree with Andrew that they don’t make sense. Your software will 
> have to take tied groups of notes and remove the ties when converting notes 
> to rests.

I was looking at that as a syntactical option to get the desired
behavior as opposed to the regular syntax which produces the current
(and surprising to me) behavior. In other words, a tied rest would
still be printed out as two rests but in the case of the lone
duration, the rest would be repeated instead of whatever note came
before the rest. It's probably a complication to the LilyPond code
that isn't worth dealing with.

Dave

On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 12:36 AM Martín Rincón Botero
<martinrinconbotero@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi David,
>
> I don’t know what software you’re using to create your Lilypond files, but 
> what working with Python and abjad has taught me is that it’s best that 
> softwares that produce Lilypond files don’t use any kind of shortcuts, they 
> should write everything explicitly (and in absolute mode) instead. I suggest 
> you program your software with that in mind: it’ll save you lots of headaches 
> down the road. Leave shortcuts and relative mode only for manually generated 
> files.
>
> As for tied rest, I’ll just agree with Andrew that they don’t make sense. 
> Your software will have to take tied groups of notes and remove the ties when 
> converting notes to rests.
>
> Cheers,
> Martín.
>
> www.martinrinconbotero.com
> On 22. Feb 2021, 09:09 +0100, David Bellows <davebellows@gmail.com>, wrote:
>
> Hello Andrew,
>
> Right, so I'm not asking for two rests to actually be tied. I was just
> hoping that the behavior of a lone duration value would repeat the
> rest right before it and not skip back till it finds a note.
>
> For example, instead of {c4 r4 16} resulting in "C, rest, C", it would
> be "C, rest, rest" with no ties anywhere.
>
> But if that is not the expected behavior from most people then perhaps
> adding a tie to the rest could tell LilyPond to make that lone
> duration a rest instead of skipping back till it finds a note.
>
> So {c4 r4~ 16) would result in: C, rest, rest (with no ties in the
> actual sheet music). If not the tilde then perhaps some other symbol
> to signify this behavior.
>
> Why cant you just have a rest of the appropriate
>
> duration? You can have dotted rests you know, and durations can be
> scaled as can note durations.
>
> My software can handle all normal durations including dotted ones. But
> a quarter tied to a 16th can only be notated with a tie. There is no
> other simple way to notate it which means I need two notes or two
> rests in my LilyPond file. I don't think scaling the duration will
> produce something that a performer would understand.
>
> I'm sure I can eventually figure out how to make LilyPond's current
> behavior work with my software, it's just that it will take a lot of
> work. If a lone duration would use a previous rest instead of going
> back to find a note, then it would be much easier for me to implement.
>
> Dave
>
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2021 at 11:23 PM Andrew Bernard
> <andrew.bernard@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Ties rests make no musical sense, even in relation to programmatically
> generated music. Why cant you just have a rest of the appropriate
> duration? You can have dotted rests you know, and durations can be
> scaled as can note durations.
>
> a
>
>
>
>