Re: Microtonal accidentals

[Hans Aberg]

On 3 Nov 2013, at 18:25, Graham Breed <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 11/03/2013 05:15 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> 
>> 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 ...
> 
> There are three approaches to this:
> 
> 1) Define note names programmatically.  You have a scheme interpreter at all 
> stages, after all.  I do this for tripod notation.
> 
> 2) Have commands to apply accidentals.  This is a solved problem as well.  I 
> have JI Sagittal support where you specify the pitch as a ratio relative to 
> the tonic.
> 
> 3) Have chained accidentals, like for Extended Helmholtz JI.  So you have a 
> \sharp command that sharpens the pitch and adds a glyph to the accidental 
> string.  This way, you can have an open ended set of accidental strings for 
> an open ended pitch space.  I think this has been implemented for the visuals 
> but not the sound.  There are problems getting both to work together.

What I proposed is an extension of this last: to every written pitch, a 
sequence of intervals might be added. The accidentals are those intervals that 
do not change the scale degree. Other intervals might be useful for 
transposing, like the octave shift operators already in use.