Re: Pitch/ octave notation

[Joseph Wakeling]

Peter O'Doherty wrote:
> Yes, this is precisely the idea. I'm typesetting music which jumps
> around a lot and instead of a,,, and a,, and c''''' and c'''' which
> becomes very confusing, the convention I am using (simply because I am
> most familiar with it) is c-1, c0, c6, c7 and so forth. It is simply
> easier to see at a glance which octave it is.

This is actually a pretty good point.  If we look in printed books which
use the ''' notation, it is a *real* pain to read and make sense of, and
very prone to typos.  Certainly from the point of view of anyone who has
read books discussing the altissimo register of woodwind instruments,
for example.  ;-)

Of course, the typo side is not *such* an issue in Lilypond, where we
can check the output.  But it is difficult to read in the text of the
.ly file nevertheless.

Mind you, I don't find it particularly difficult to use the \relative
command for music that "jumps around".  In fact it's helpful, because
you just have to add enough ' or , to shift the octave.

The problem with the number-based input idea is that it seems to me to
be much less easy to have an intuitive "relative" input with this.
Keeping the ''' and ,,, is probably a compromise that works better on
average.