Re: Lilypond's internal pitch representation and microtonal notation

[Hans Aberg]

On 20 Sep 2010, at 12:08, Joseph Wakeling wrote:

> > > Hence why I say that the issue of effective microtonal support still
> > > requires action at the code level, and is not simply a matter of  
> > > better
> > > documentation ... :-(
> >
> > I made a post about this issue last week, but there were no  
> > responses.
> >
> > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2010-09/ 
> > msg00138.html
>
> I saw the post but was not sure quite how to interpret it.

I expected someone to ask for details. In the past, I discussed part  
of it with Graham Breed, who did some LilyPond microtonal  
implementation, but perhaps he is not working on it anymore.

> Could you
> write up some more extensive notes on the algorithm and its aims and
> possibilities?

If you want, I can explain it - the algorithm itself is very simple.  
Writing up it in math style will probably not make it more accessible.

> I did wonder if the fact it was Haskell code was part of the reason  
> for
> the lack of response.  I have a lot of admiration for Haskell but I  
> can
> see there being problems extending Lilypond with yet another language.

It should not be difficult to translate into Scheme - no specific  
Haskell features are used, only better syntax and type system to help  
structuring the code. It is just a page.

The difficulty is to figure out to put it into LilyPond.