Fixed: Introduction to the Musical Notation section #80
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| <dt><dfn>Logical Unit</dfn></dt> | ||
| <dd>A logical unit of notation data consists of one or more characters that represent a single musical notation | ||
| figure.</dd> |
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What is a musical notation figure? This is not clear, or am I lacking context?
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No, that's a very good question. The definitions are mostly placeholders now. As I work through the sections I'm trying to figure out what concepts need to be defined.
So I think for now it would be good to just let this go while I try to sort everything out, and then we can do another pass trying to standardize the language and the definitions and concepts.
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"entity"? or "event"? figure does not make sense to me.
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Is it ok to leave this as-is until we figure out what we want to call it, and then edit to make it consistent?
| <li>(optional) The octave character(s);</li> | ||
| <li>(optional) The duration character, followed by a duration dot character;</li> |
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I think we need to keep the order between octave an duration flexible, but maybe this is for a later fix?
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Do you have a use case where keeping the order flexible is useful?
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No. It is just than when typing it requires additional thinking to have a fix order. I would understand people would complain about it since. Also, there is no strong argument for having the octave before the duration - one might argue that octave relates to the pitch, so that duration should come first.
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I guess the argument is that it simplifies data processing to know where these characters can occur. I'm OK with swapping the order which they can occur, but I think that if we have an opportunity to make the data more rigorous, we should take it.
If there is feedback when typing, users will likely get used to the correct order. It may even be helpful to them because then they don't have to remember the order to be self-consistent.
It also only applies when both octave AND duration are provided, which will be infrequent -- typically one or the other (or both) will be omitted.
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I agree that we need to simplify data processing as much as possible. That would be the only exception for me from my (little) experience in cataloguing incipit. Maybe @jenniferward has a opinion on this?
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I have been paying attention to the order of octave vs. duration for a while now and I do find that sometimes my brain says "OK, first octave" and sometimes it says "OK, first duration". I think it happens when there is a significant switch: a big octave change or a big rhythmic change or if I have to coordinate one of them with other elements (curly brackets etc.). But I haven't kept track of when this happens, it's just my feeling.
Can we take a look at the data and find out how often '''4 vs. 4''' (or similar) happens? I think we can get used to a consistent order if prompted but I'd be curious what the natural tendency is.
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I think this is the main point. It really depends on the content of the music. Sometimes it clearly makes more sense to have the octave first, and sometimes the other way around. Running an analysis to see if there is a clear tendency towards octave-first would be good.
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I'm fine with octave-first. I'm also fine with duration first. I am happy to do an analysis to see which is more preferred.
However, the bigger question (and the answer that is needed to move this PR forward) is whether we leave the option of both orders being acceptable. I think we should pick one or the other. We don't gain any expressiveness in the notation by allowing both orders, so we don't really get anything by allowing it. The thing we lose is consistency, though.
To me, @jenniferward 's comment on not always remembering the ordering would seem to speak towards mandating one or the other so that encoders do not have to remember this to be consistent. It may be annoying at first to those used to the more lax methods, but once it is learned it will likely be a non-issue.
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I meant that my fingers go naturally to either the octave first or the duration first, depending on musical context.
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I was talking this over with Catherine tonight, and she made a suggestion that makes sense, but comes a bit out of left field: we adopt a modified version of Helmholtz notation for pitch and octave. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_pitch_notation That is, we notate it as duration-pitch-octave. For the fourth octave and above this will map almost exactly to the standard Helmholtz notation, varying only by the case of the letters (we use uppercase). For the lower octaves we keep the comma notation. Helmholtz indicates this by case or by a single comma in the contra octave, but I don’t think we can do this. I like this suggestion because it aligns us with an existing standard for the ordering of note elements. But I can also see that it’s a bigger change than intended. |
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I think if we were inventing PAE that would be a good option. But yes, this I think would be too much of a change. |
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Fixes #43
Fixes #56