Re: Microtonal accidentals

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 03/11/13 17:55, Hans Aberg wrote:
> As a preparation, LilyPond might get intervals: it is going to be too 
> complicated to write out names for all pitch combinations.
>
> A pitch is defined by a written pitch plus a sequence of intervals added to it. 
> Accidentals are a special case: intervals not changing the scale degree.

You've raised a very important point that I was going to mention myself in 
slightly different wording.

There needs to be a way of defining pitches that separates the work of defining 
staff notes from the work of defining alterations, and constructs pitch names as 
a combination of the two.

The current method where (using English names) c, cf, cs, d, df, ds, e, ef, es, 
f, ff, fs, g, gf, gs, a, af, as and b, bf, bs are all defined, just doesn't 
scale when you are dealing with many different kinds of microtonal alteration.

It's just about feasible, if you really want to, to define a quarter-tone scale 
this way.  You can see this in the answer that I gave last year to a user who 
was interested in defining a 16th-tone scale:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2012-06/msg00443.html

So, there needs to be a way of saying: these are the staff pitches and the staff 
positions they correspond to (define c, d, e, f, g, a, b) and these are the 
alterations and the accidentals they correspond to (define -s, -f, etc.), now 
give me my list of available pitch names ...

That isn't a precondition of solving the microtonal notation issue but it would 
be strongly complementary.