Re: Lilypond's internal pitch representation and microtonal notation

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 5:25 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> Joseph Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Indeed, d-3/4 is not sufficient [1]: in arrow quarter-tone notation you
>> want to be able to indicate quarter-tone raising or lowering of any of
>> the 12 standard tones.
>
> One solution would be to allow pitch modifiers to be a list of fractions
> rather than just a single fraction.
>
> Sounds rather messy.

Yes.  My first thought was to add a fourth value to pitches -- octave,
scale-note, normal-alteration, extra-alteration -- but this would also
make things messy.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with lilypond internals to make any kind
of guess as to which is messier, or whether there's any alternate
methods of doing this... I'm just trying to help the organization of
development, and defining the problem clearly is the first step.  :)

Cheers,
- Graham