Re: select a note in a chord

[David Kastrup]

Valentin Villenave <address@hidden> writes:

> On 1/29/19, Davide Bonetti <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Ok, now it works well!
>
> Greetings everybody,
>
> David K. raised an interesting question with regard to the
> \invertChords function:
> https://codereview.appspot.com/365840043/#msg18
>
> Basically (IIUC), he’s thinking that
>
> \invertChords 1 <c' e' g' b' d'' f''>
>
> should ideally result in
>
> <e' g' b' d'' f'' c'''>
>
> rather than
>
> <e' g' b' c'' d'' f''>
>
> (as the current implementation produces).
>
> Any thoughts?

David Kastrup did not think anything like that.  While it seems like an
actually quite worthwhile thought, my concern in the review rather was
that with the c'' ending up in the middle of the result chord, it will
come up earlier for another octavation in higher-numbered inversions
than the f'' would.  So my idea rather was to not use repeatedly a 2nd
inversion for the sake of generating higher inversions but rather figure
out the notes to be octavated from the initial chord and then octavate
all of them at once, not disturbing their relative order.

What you flatteringly call "my" thought would additionally maintain
"circular" order of the pitches, basically rotating pitches and then
octavating as needed to make sure that later pitches don't end up before
earlier pitches.

That could end up saner and it would actually work in repeated
application of \raiseNote without requiring rewriting the internals of
\invertChords .

My objection was more addressing a mathematical/programming
inconsistency rather than bothering with musical sense.  But addressing
this from the musical end, regarding its actual effect rather than its
logical ramifications, might be a saner approach.

Maybe the cleanest in a musical sense would be if an "inversion" split
the set of pitches into two, the ones preceding the inversion point and
the ones afterwards and then raise the octaves of the preceding pitches
en bloc such that the first inverted pitch becomes higher than the last
non-inverted pitch.

That would not be exactly like repeated application of \raiseNote (which
could in theory end up "flattening" more than one interval happening to
be larger than an octave) but probably be the most "musically" correct
and predictable way to do this.

-- 
David Kastrup