Re: Setting Gregorian chant: Note spacing for two note neumes seem to depend on length of lyric text

[Aaron Hill]

On 2020-10-07 8:44 am, Matthew Fong wrote:
> Hello Aaron,
>
> I did find an issue with your syllable function. It seems to swallow up
> dots, that is, if I take your sample code
> \syllable { a'\( \melisma c'' b'\tenuto \melismaEnd }
>
> and add a dot, it is ignored. I am playing around with an episema vs. 
> dot.
> \syllable { a'4.\( \melisma c'' b'\tenuto \melismaEnd }

The dot is part of the duration, which is overridden by \syllable.  In 
fact, \syllable completely ignores any durations that might be 
specified.  The intention here is that \syllable is fully responsible 
for defining duration, so as a user you would be advised not to include 
any durations within the music expression.

Do you need the actual rhythmic Dot or simply a dot-shaped articulation?

----

Another way of looking at the problem is for a function to manage 
scaling provided music of arbitrary length to fit within the measure.  
This is a significantly easier task from the engineering perspective, as 
LilyPond provides all the building blocks:

%%%%
\version "2.20.0"

fitTo =
#(define-music-function
  (duration music)
  (ly:duration? ly:music?)
  (ly:music-compress music
    (ly:moment-div
      (ly:duration-length duration)
      (ly:music-length music))))

{ \time 1/4 \hide Staff.BarLine \omit Stem \omit Flag
  \fitTo 4 { a'4\( c'' b'4*3\tenuto }
  \fitTo 4 { a'2 b'2*4\) }
  \fitTo 4 { a'4. c''8-> a'4_( b'4*2) }
  \fitTo 4 { b'\breve } }
\addlyrics {
  lor -- _ _ em _ i -- _ _ psum
}
%%%%

The results above are similar to earlier examples I posted in terms of 
spacing and clumping of notes.  The added bonus is that different note 
heads are possible, as \syllable only outputs quarter notes.  Of course, 
I had to \omit Flag due to the presence of an eighth note in the third 
note group.

\syllable is still much nicer from the user's perspective, as one can 
safely think in terms of pitch only.  The above example required me as 
the user to manually compute the durations of notes so that they would 
scale properly and be consistent from measure to measure.  Try changing 
the "2*4" in the second note group to "2*3" or "2*5" and note how the 
entire spacing of the piece is impacted.


-- Aaron Hill