Hi folks, A friend of mine asked the following question, which I find pretty mysterious.
In theย Unicode musical symbols block, the available microtonal accidentals are
these:
- ๐ฌ U+1D12C MUSICAL SYMBOL FLAT UP andย ๐ญ U+1D12D MUSICAL SYMBOL FLAT DOWN
-ย ๐ฎย U+1D12E MUSICAL SYMBOL NATURAL UP and ๐ฏ U+1D12F MUSICAL SYMBOL NATURAL DOWN
-ย ๐ฐย U+1D130 MUSICAL SYMBOL SHARP UP and ๐ฑ U+1D131 MUSICAL SHARP DOWN
- ๐ฒ U+1D132 MUSICAL SYMBOL QUARTER TONE SHARP and ๐ณ U+1D133 MUSICAL SYMBOL
QUARTER TONE FLAT
In case you have fonts where these are as ridiculously small as on my
system, attached is a chart made with
\markuplist \override #'((padding . 2) (baseline-skip . 5))
\table #`(,CENTER ,RIGHT ,CENTER ,RIGHT) {
\fontsize #10 ๐ฌ "flat up" \fontsize #10 ๐ญ "flat down"
\fontsize #10 ๐ฎ "natural up" \fontsize #10 ๐ฏ "natural down"
\fontsize #10 ๐ฐ "sharp up" \fontsize #10 ๐ฑ "sharp down"
\fontsize #15 ๐ฒ "quarter tone sharp" \fontsize #15 ๐ณ "quarter tone flat"
}
The glyphs with arrows are AFAIK standard, and available in LilyPond
as accidentals.{flat,natural,sharp}.arrow{down,up}. But what about
the "quarter tone {sharp,flat}", which look like a sharp/flat with
an added digit 4?
I've never seen these. LilyPond's Emmentaler font doesn't have them
https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.25/Documentation/notation/accidental-glyphs .
The SMuFL standard has a *very* extensive set of accidentals, see
https://w3c.github.io/smufl/latest/tables/standard-accidentals-12-edo.html
and the following sections; yet I couldn't find them there either.
There is a Unicode proposal not yet accepted
https://unicode.org/L2/L2023/23276-quarter-tone-accidentals.pdf
to encode the more standard accidentals which are the default
in LilyPond (try { ceh' cih' } ): a sharp with only one
vertical branch, and a mirrored flat. The proposal quotes
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb38-2/tb119hufflen-music.pdf :
"The glyphs defined by Unicode at present are ๐ฒ๎(U+1D132) and
๐ณ๎(U+1D133): we have *never* seen them in *any* score."
The original proposal to encode these in Unicode was
https://unicode.org/L2/L1998/98045.pdf
and gives zero details.
Does anybody have a clue where the heck these glyphs come from?
Which composers might have used them?
Cheers,
Jean
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