Re: Doc: Some miscellaneous suggestions from Peter Toye (issue 579280043 by address@hidden)

[michael . kaeppler]

On 2020/02/11 11:22:40, lilypond_ptoye.com wrote:
> Monday, February 10, 2020, 10:00:03 PM, you wrote:
> 
> > On 2020/02/09 16:15:53, thomasmorley651 wrote:
> >> On 2020/02/09 15:32:14, http://lilypond_ptoye.com wrote:
> >> 
> >> > Surely "standard scale pitch or previously altered pitch". In D
> > major: "cis c
> >> > cis" the first note is an alteration but not an accidental, the
> > second is an
> >> > accidental but not an alteration, the third is both. Now I'm
really
> > splitting
> >> > hairs.
> >> 
> >> I read this as "In D major the note c _is_ an accidental". 
> >> Or did you mean _has_ an accidental?
> >> 
> >> > I'm beginning to think that this is all getting too theologial.
I'm
> > a
> >> practising musician, not a theorist, and I raised the point as I'd
never
> heard of
> >> > 'alteration' used in this rather technical sense. If people are
> > happy with the
> >> > distinction let's just keep it and I withdraw my suggestion.
> >> 
> >> Wait. If we try to improve the docs we need to care about best
> > wordings, so that
> >> people speaking different language and with different musical
> > education
> >> understand what we want to express.
> 
> > +1
> 
> >> 
> >> Furthermore we need to explain how we do things in LilyPond.
> >> Look at:
> >> mus = { \key d \major cis'4 }
> >> #(display-scheme-music (car (music-pitches mus)))
> >> #(display-scheme-music (ly:pitch-alteration (car (music-pitches
> > mus))))
> >> =>
> >> (ly:make-pitch 0 0 1/2)
> >> 1/2
> >> 
> >> First how the cis is seen in LilyPond, second the alteration.
> > (ofcourse no
> >> Accidental is printed in pdf)
> >> Do the same with note c and you see no alteration, i.e. 0 (ofcourse
an
> >> Accidental is printed)
> >> Do similar with c and cis (and you see the alteration for cis again
> > and an
> >> accidental for cis is printed)
> 
> > However, I think that the description of
> > LilyPond's internal pitch data
> > structure
> > is not helpful for this (pretty introductory) part of the docs.
> > The longer I think about it, the more I'm unsure if the term
> > "alteration" makes
> > sense for a basic understanding how pitches are entered in LilyPond.
> > If I think about a, lets say D major scale, I would not say that the
> > pitch 'fis' is an 'altered' note, though it is stored that way in
the
> > data structure. 'Alteration' for me always
> > refers to some 'unaltered'
> > form. 
> > Our pitch naming system with a 'nucleus' (e.g. 'f') and some
suffices
> > (e.g. '-is') OTOH supports the conclusion, that a pitch consists of
> > some base, diatonic pitch and possibles alterations.
> > It is also conclusive, though, that LilyPond 
> > uses the C major scale as the base for its pitch structure.
> 
> The nub of the question is the difference between how a musician
thinks of a
> note name and how it get written/engraved. If I'm working on paper I
don't think
> of  'C sharp' as 'C' modified by 'sharp'. I think of it as a single
entity. It's
> about 70 years since I learnt musical notation, and that was in the
English
> system on the piano, where the white notes have names which are
letters, and the
> black notes have what I was told (somewhat incorrectly) were called
> 'accidentals'. I think key signatures came later. I discovered about
German
> notation using 'B' for the note one diatonic tone below C much later -
so my
> previous comment about the 'black notes' doesn't work.

I fully agree with this point. I think we have to distinguish
the 'normal', colloquial use of the term 'note name' (which
refers to the whole note name as an entity) from the internal
data structure that uses the term 'note name' for 
the diatonic nucleus. (As Harm pointed out in #26)
There is even a function, called 'ly:pitch-notename' 
that (IIRC) does not return a string like 'fis' as one could
think, but an integer refering to the steps of the
default scale. 

I would propose to use the term 'note name' in the 
introductory docs only in the former sense.

> 
> I've just had a very quick look at musicXML and I have to admit that
this seems
> to take the same view as LilyPond - note plus alteration - and they
even use the
> tag <alter> for the latter. So the use of 'alteration' as a technical
term does
> at least have some justification. 
> 
> But my concern was, and still is, that a newbie coming to Lilypond and
needing
> to check up on exactly how to engrave a C sharp won't find much help
in the
> section headings in the LM. I speak from experience form my early
fumblings with
> LP. We shouldn't discourage new users by hiding what are, in practical
terms,
> the easy bits.

Would it help if we used 'Pitch entry' or 'Entering pitches' for the
section
in LM 2.1.2, instead of 'Pitch alterations'?
This would involve changing of cross-references, though.



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