To explain the concept of a square character, let's look at a separate project
to mine: the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is used by dictionaries and
the like to unambiguously describe how to pronounce any word in any language.
It has a symbol for every sound your mouth can conceivably make.
But that's more sounds than there are letters in the alphabet. The response of
the Association was to add more glyphs. I think that in an age of Unicode we
have just as many glyphs as we need right now, thank you very much - and I
despise alt codes and the dreaded Character Map.
A long time ago, the Romans had a problem of running out of numerals when their
numbers got too big. The Arabs responded by creating the numeral system we use
today that doesn't need more symbols than 0 through 9.
That's basically what I'm doing to the International Phonetic Alphabet - we
want more sounds than there are letters in A through Z - so we don't add more
letters, we simply square them, declaring individual characters to be
irrelevant except as halves of pairs of characters, or 'squares'. Now I can
represent every letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet with two strokes
of the keyboard everyone has - because CC isn't CS isn't SC isn't SS. It's a
side project of mine that also uses square characters, and may even prove
useful in a parallel format - but I am only a lay phonetician, and that square
alphabet is not finished enough to present.
It goes to show that there is at least one application of a (parallel) square
alphabet besides premusic, which likely implies there's more. It's a very
powerful format that merits an optimized text editor environment.
Viral Anticapital
http://anti.capital
--------- Original Message --------- Subject: Re: What can Premusic do that
others can't?
From: "Jacques Menu Muzhic" <imj-muz...@bluewin.ch>
Date: 3/20/17 6:42 pm
To: have@anti.capital
Cc: "Jacques Menu Muzhic" <imj-muz...@bluewin.ch>, "Lilypond User List"
<lilypond-user@gnu.org>, "David Kastrup" <d...@gnu.org>
Hello Have,
I don't understand what you mean by square characters: can you make that more
clear?
There are text editors you can use I guess for the parallel aspect of what
seems to be a measure-wise notation IIUC, i.e. those that offer block-mode
editing such as Win-EDT on Windows.
There's a tree structure in nearly all music, written or played: parts are
performed in parallel, each of them made of voices. The latter usually get
grouped into staves for reading and organisation commodity, and repeats, da
capos and codas add more structure to that. An organ music score is an example
of such a tree.
All text notations used to represent trees have a difficult problem. MusicXML
is not meant to be used by composers or music aficionados, it is an exchange
format designed for use by computer applications. The order of the various
markups such as <part-list/> and <part-list/> is defined by a DTD.
In the example below, the <note/> contains the sharp <accidental/>, but the <p
/> dynamic occurs before it. It could have been placed inside the <note/> too,
though. Such design choices were not made at random, there are reasons behind
them.
<direction placement="below">
<direction-type>
<dynamics>
<p />
</dynamics>
</direction-type>
</direction>
<note>
<pitch>
<step>C</step>
<alter>1</alter>
<octave>4</octave>
</pitch>
<duration>16</duration>
<voice>1</voice>
<type>half</type>
<accidental>sharp</accidental>
</note>
In this other example, there's a partgroup containing two parts, one for each
flute, with respective parts « 1 » and « 2 » sharing a
single staff as is often the case in orchestral scores.
</part-group>
<score-part id="P2">
<part-name>Flutes</part-name>
<part-abbreviation>Fl.</part-abbreviation>
<score-instrument id="P2-I19">
<instrument-name>Fl.</instrument-name>
</score-instrument>
<midi-instrument id="P2-I19">
<midi-channel>2</midi-channel>
<midi-program>74</midi-program>
</midi-instrument>
</score-part>
<part-group number="2" type="stop"/>
<part-group number="2" type="start">
<group-name>1
2</group-name>
<group-barline>yes</group-barline>
</part-group>
And the horns sections is a sub-partgroup in this score, with 4 voices grouped
into two staves. MusicXML precisely is weird in this area BTW: it does not
represent a staff group (tree of groups) as a tree, by allows for «
intelaced groups », which is arguable:
How do you represent such complex structures with Premusic?
JM
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