Re: Help? Asciification of musical language

Rachel Klippenstein wrote:
> Hello everyone
> It's been a while since I've posted, but I haven't been away.
> I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for how to represent a
> musical language online... I have such a project on a back burner, and
> I think I would have more incentive to work on it if I could post to
> the list.  I've sort of figured out an own writing system for it, but I
> haven't managed to figure out a successful ascii representation for it.
>
> A fairly full description of the phonology I'm trying to represent can
> be found in the archives here:
> http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0309C&L=conlang&P=R20245&D=0&H=0&O=T&T=1
>
> Or, here's a briefer description:
> -It's based on relative pitch, not absolute pitch
> -There are 7 different notes (the equivalent of segments)
> -Beats (the equivalent of syllables) contain 1 to 4 notes
> -The relative lengths of the notes within the beat is not phonemic
>
> So the system needs to be able to represent the 7 notes and their
> grouping into beats; I think that's all.
>
> I could just represent the notes with note-names, with |a| (or possibly
> |c|) representing the first note of the scale, and putting a symbol
> like a hyphen between the notes, so that you would end up with
> something like
>
> a adg abde-dg deg-fc a
>
> (Not representing real words, since I don't have any yet; just trying
> to convey a visual impression)  My issue with this is that using
> letters looks like they're intended to be pronounced as consonants and
> vowels; also, it gives the false impression that it represents the
> actual intervals between the notes - that |ac| represents an interval
> of a minor 3rd, like going from A natural to C natural.  This isn't the
> case, since it merely indicates the first and third notes of the scale,
> which could be either a major or minor scale, or neither.
>
> Or I could use the numbers to represent the notes, with 1 being the
> first note of the scale, and 7 being the 7th.  Then the above sequence
> of notes would be written
>
> 1 147 1245-47 457-63 1
>
> That looks terribly illegible to me.
Actually, from my musician viewpoint, this is more intelligible than
using letters. To me, the letters would 'require' a non-relativistic
interpretation (some people say that I have 'perfect pitch'; I don't
think it's 'perfect' but rather PDG.) Anyway, the number system lets the
scale/pitch element reside in the background more easily for me.

> What do youguys think?  Letters, numbers or something else?  I guess
> you could write it in solfege...  That might be better.  Hmm, that
> would give something like
>
> do dofati dorefaso-fati fasoti-lami do
Again, this is too precisely related to actual pitch/intervals for me.
Then again, I imagine that non-musicians would probably find either the
letters or solfege easier than numbers.

On a topic related to your earlier post:
you said:

 >beat: a beat is the equivalent of a syllable. A beat can have anywhere
 >from 1 to 4 notes in it. The number of notes per beat is highly
 >relevant, the length of the individual notes is not so important.

I think you could get a lot of syntactic mileage out of specifying the
actual durations of each of the notes within a beat. Musically, 3 notes
of equal duration in a beat ('triplets') sounds distinctly different
from 'long-short-short', 'short-long-short', and 'short-short-long'. It
appears that you are already planning this rhythmic distinction, as
stated in the following:

 >Rhythm (within the beat): Rhythm within the beat is somewhat variable.
 >As long as each beat contains the correct number of notes, the
relative >lengths of the notes can vary, and this variation can also be
used to >express non-lexical information. So a three-note beat could
have 3 >notes of even length, two short notes then a long note, or a
long note >then two short notes.

With 4 notes per beat, unless they are all the same length (16th notes),
you will end up effectively creating a lot of 'odd' subdivisions. While
that is not a problem, it could make the time length of your beats get a
bit large for efficient communication. Is this language meant to be
sung, played on an instrument, programmed into greeting cards? ;) If
played on an instrument, then the time issue probably won't be such a
big deal, but if it is vocal then it seems to me (as one who likes to
sing but is not trained as a singer) that slowing down a bit would be
required for accuracy.

Anyway, my 2 cents.

--
=============
James Worlton
          "We know by means of our intelligence
          that what the intelligence does not
          comprehend is more real than what it
          does comprehend."
                           --Simone Weil

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