Re: Suggestion to make sharps and flats persistent

[David Nalesnik]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 3:34 PM antlists <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 13/05/2020 16:38, David Kastrup wrote:
> > Given the number of English-speaking LilyPond users who all share the
> > somewhat strange habit of calling a b-flat "b" if there is a flat in the
> > key signature, it is sort of a safe bet that you are not the first to
> > make this kind of proposal.
>
> Are these the same ones who call b an h?
>
> Certainly for someone who's mother tongue is English (NOT American) I'd
> never call b-flat a b because how would I tell whether it's flat or not :-)
>

! hear it a lot in the US.  (And it's often correlated with losing
sight of the key signature...)

Interestingly, a separation between "note name" and "alteration" is
part of LilyPond internals:

Function: ly:make-pitch octave note alter
octave is specified by an integer, zero for the octave containing
middle C. note is a number indexing the global default scale, with 0
corresponding to pitch C and 6 usually corresponding to pitch B.
Optional alter is a rational number of 200-cent whole tones for
alteration

David N.