Re: Combine Text/Lyrics with bass figures

[Urs Liska]

Hi Moritz,


Moritz Heffter – Fri, 26. June 2020 13:26
> Hi Urs, hi Lukas,
> That looks very good, Lukas. And thank for coming up with the idea of
> integrating arabic scale degree numbers in lilypond, Urs. I’ll join the lobby
> team if you want :).

Definitely!

> For the usage of the numbers I just have two remarks, that might be far from
> what is currently discussed. But I think it might be good to think about the
> requirements for the arabic numbers.
> Just two thoughts on that:(1) I wonder if it’s good to combine the arabic
> scale degrees with the figured bass in one layer. There might be reasons to
> put figure bass numbers above the bass line. I’m not so deep in the figured
> bass mode in lilypond (only use one layer to write the numbers) but I think in
> order to be flexibel in layout and in keeping information not too nestled it
> might be good, to separate these information.

There are situations where you'll want one or the other. However, it's easy to 
write arabic numbers in one layer and just leave out the figures to encode them 
separately. So having the option to use them combined doesn't get in the way of 
your suggestion.

> (2) There might also be cases where you have more that one row of arabic
> numbers to indicate other options. My first intention here would be to have a
> single layer for every key, that is used in the analysis. If there’s an option
> to hide the layer where it is not used.

Each layer is a Lyrics or FiguredBass context, and when there's no content it's 
simply not produced. So that's not an issue. What's more interesting as an 
option is to *hide* the elements in a layer. In that case it *will* use the 
space but keep it empty. With that you can prepare a sheet for 
presentatio/teaching and have it filled along the discussion (i.e. without 
initially confronting the students with overcrowded analysis sheets.

> I hope I’m not making things more complicated and got the intention right :).

No, you don't, and yes you did ;-)
(somewhat strange, though, to discuss this at this moment and in this place, 
isn't it?)

Best
Urs

> 
> Best,Moritz
> 
> > Am 26.06.2020 um 12:36 schrieb Urs Liska <lists@openlilylib.org>:
> Hi Lukas,
> 
> that's great, and I hope you'll stick with me when I try to work that
> out into a generally usable (i.e. sufficiently flexible) solution to
> lobby with the GMTH ;-)
> 
> Am Freitag, den 26.06.2020, 10:07 +0200 schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser:
> > Hi Urs,
> 
> > Hey, that looks promising - I didn't know that.
> Now I'd only need a way to properly do the vertical alignment
> against
> the baseline of the lowest markup:
> 
> \figures {
> <6 4 \markup { \circle \number 5 }>
> <3+ \markup { \circle \number 6 }>
> }
> 
> 
> This might be achieved using an inversed stacking direction.
> 
> 
> Great.
> 
> > Harm's
> figure reversal function can then be used to enable the user to
> still
> enter bass figures in the "usual" way.
> 
> With a bit of syntactic sugar, this might look as below.
> 
> 
> I've started working on that, see below ...
> 
> > 
> Problems so far:
> 
> 1) The figures are still down-aligned. This might be remedied for
> instance by defining a "maximal" number of figures for which to
> leave
> space and inserting placeholders. (This reminds me of one of my
> long-time wishes, namely to have a dedicated "empty" figure for use
> in
> FiguredBass, which is sometimes needed to leave space for figures
> that
> are added later in a chord. I once patched my LilyPond to allow for
> this, but this was an ugly hack involving transparent figures...)
> 
> 
> I have *not* started working on this yet. I don't find transparent
> markups that offensive. It's a commonplace approach also for achieving
> consistent baselines for strings without as/descenders.
> 
> However, what we *actually* want is a common number of items *per
> system*, not for the whole score. What if we determine maximum number
> of entries of 3 and have many systems only use one - that would make
> for ugly whitespace all over the place.
> 
> The only remedy I can see right now would be to deal with this in an
> after-line-breaking stencil. From there we could iterate over the whole
> system and check the maximum number of actually used layers. The result
> should be cached so this process is done only once per system.
> However, this won't always work because the context may not have been
> pushed sufficiently far down in situations like the attached example.
> 
> > 
> 2) The "get-current-duration" function is simply awful: I didn't
> know
> how to find out which duration the parser would assign to a
> duration-less note/bass figure, so I just let it create a note and
> see
> what its duration becomes. There must be a decent way to achieve
> this.
> (I need to give the bassStufe-function a duration because otherwise
> it
> does not work with figure \none.)
> 
> 
> I've made a number of improvements to your code:
> 
> 1)
> reverseFigures creates a new music expression, from which you later
> retrieve the 'elements, which is unnecessary. (I renamed it to parse-
> signature
> 
> 2)
> The figures do have their durations included, so we can retrieve them
> *here* and reuse that information later when generating the
> BassFigureEvent for the bass step markup.
> 
> 2a)
> Instead of \none I rewrote \scaledeg to accept either a figure
> signature or a duration. This gives a nice interface where you can just
> specify a duration for an empty figure.
> 
> Apart from that I've just added a few predicates to make the input more
> reliable and have typecheck warnings.
> 
> I think this is going into a nice direction!
> 
> Best
> Urs
> 
> \version "2.20.0"
> 
> \layout {
> \override BassFigureAlignment.stacking-dir = #UP
> }
> 
> #(define (parse-signature sig) ; based on \reverseFigures by Harm
> (if
> ;; sig is either an EventChord (music) or a duration
> (ly:music? sig)
> (let*
> ((reversed
> (reverse
> (map
> (lambda (e)
> (cond ((and
> (eq? #t (ly:music-property e 'bracket-start))
> (eq? #t (ly:music-property e 'bracket-stop)))
> '())
> ((eq? #t (ly:music-property e 'bracket-start))
> (begin
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-start '())
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-stop #t)))
> ((eq? #t (ly:music-property e 'bracket-stop))
> (begin
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-stop '())
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-start #t))))
> e)
> (ly:music-property sig 'elements))))
> (duration (ly:music-property (first reversed) 'duration)))
> (cons duration reversed))
> (cons sig '())
> ))
> 
> #(define (scale-degree degree duration)
> (let
> ((step-markup
> (if (eqv? degree 0)
> (markup #:null)
> (markup #:circle #:small #:number (number->string degree)))))
> (make-musics
> 'BassFigureEvent
> 'duration
> duration
> 'text
> (markup #:with-dimensions '(0 . 1) '(0 . 5) step-markup))
> ))
> 
> #(define (bass-degree? obj)
> "A bass degree is either a number between 1 and 7 or 0 (eqv. to
> nothing)!"
> (and (integer? obj) (> 8 obj) (< -1 obj)))
> 
> #(define (figure-signature? obj)
> "A figure signature is either an EventChord music or a duration."
> (or
> (and
> (ly:music? obj)
> (music-is-of-type? obj 'event-chord))
> (ly:duration? obj)))
> 
> scaledeg =
> #(define-music-function (num signature) ((bass-degree? 0) figure-
> signature?)
> (let*
> ((props (parse-signature signature))
> (duration (car props))
> (used-signature (cdr props)))
> (make-music
> 'EventChord
> 'elements
> (cons (scale-degree num duration)
> used-signature))))
> 
> <<
> \new Staff { \clef bass d2 e4 fis g2 a b cis' d' g2 fis1 }
> \figures {
> \scaledeg 1 <5 3>2
> \scaledeg 2 <6>4
> \scaledeg 3 <6>4
> \scaledeg 4 <6 5>2
> \scaledeg 5 2
> \scaledeg 6 <6>2
> \scaledeg 7 <6>4
> \scaledeg <6 5>
> \scaledeg 1 <5 3>2
> \scaledeg 4 <4 2>
> \scaledeg 3 <6>1
> }
> > > 
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> Best
> Lukas
> 
> 
> 
> \version "2.20.0"
> 
> \layout {
> \override BassFigureAlignment.stacking-dir = #UP
> }
> 
> reverseFigures = % by Harm
> #(define-music-function (mus)(ly:music?)
> (music-map
> (lambda (m)
> (if (music-is-of-type? m 'event-chord)
> (let ((ev-chrd-elts (ly:music-property m 'elements)))
> (ly:music-set-property! m 'elements
> (reverse
> (map
> (lambda (e)
> (cond ((and (eq? #t
> (ly:music-property e 'bracket-start))
> (eq? #t
> (ly:music-property e 'bracket-stop)))
> '())
> ((eq? #t
> (ly:music-property e 'bracket-start))
> (begin
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-start '())
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-stop #t)))
> ((eq? #t
> (ly:music-property e 'bracket-stop))
> (begin
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-stop '())
> (ly:music-set-property! e 'bracket-start #t))))
> e)
> ev-chrd-elts)))
> m)
> m))
> mus))
> 
> get-current-duration =
> #(define-scheme-function () ()
> (let* ((tempmusic #{ {a} #})
> (els (ly:music-property tempmusic 'elements)))
> (ly:music-property (car els) 'duration)))
> 
> bassStufe =
> #(define-music-function (num) (integer?)
> (let ((scale-markup
> (if (> num 0)
> #{ \markup \circle \small \number #(number->string
> num) #}
> (markup #:null))))
> 
> (make-music
> 'BassFigureEvent
> 'duration
> (get-current-duration)
> 'text
> #{ \markup
> \with-dimensions #'(0 . 1) #'(0 . 5)
> #scale-markup
> #})))
> 
> scaledeg =
> #(define-music-function (num signatur) ((integer? 0) ly:music?)
> (let ((signatur-reversed (reverseFigures signatur)))
> (make-music
> 'EventChord
> 'elements
> (cons (bassStufe num)
> (ly:music-property signatur-reversed 'elements)))))
> 
> none = {}
> 
> <<
> \new Staff { \clef bass d2 e4 fis g2 a b cis' d' g2 fis1 }
> \figures {
> \scaledeg 1 <5 3>2
> \scaledeg 2 <6>4
> \scaledeg 3 <6>
> \scaledeg 4 <6 5>2
> \scaledeg 5 \none
> \scaledeg 6 <6>2
> \scaledeg 7 <6>4
> \scaledeg <6 5>
> \scaledeg 1 <5 3>2
> \scaledeg 4 <4 2>
> \scaledeg 3 <6>1
> }
> > > 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> <scaledegrees.png>