Re: Suggestion: Use non powers of 2 for tuplets

[Jean Abou Samra]

> Hello!
>
> Currently Lilypond only supports powers of 2 for specifying duration. Could we
> use the other numbers for common divisions?
>
> For example: We could use 3 for 2*3/2, 5 for 4*5/4, 6 for 4*3/2, 7 for 8*7/8,
> 9 for 8*9/8, 10 for 8*5/4, 11 for 8*11/8, 12 for 8*3/2 and so on.
>
> This would be quite useful, especially for the divisions of three (*3/2),
> because stuff like this
> e8*2/3 dis cis cis8. dis16 e8*2/3 dis cis cis8. dis16
> Is not really nice to enter, while
> e12 dis cis cis8. dis16 e12 dis cis cis8. dis16
> would be much less effort.
>
> Cheers, Valentin

Thank you for proposing your ideas! That said,
I admit some skepticism to this particular
proposal, see below.

> These things are done during parsing, and I don’t know if there is any way to
> pass flags or tokens to the parser. If it is possible, one could try to pass a
> rounding flag, or one might even be able to modify this such that the user can
> pass a scheme function for parsing. But I do not know enough about the parser
> to know if such stuff is possible (the problem here is that the file that is
> being parsed would have to tell the parser how to parse it, which can be quite
> a hen and egg problem).

The parser does already have such capabilities.
For example, you can define your own note
names -- so why not your own durations after all.


Le 26/03/2021 à 12:43, Werner LEMBERG a écrit :

> > > For example: We could use 3 for 2*3/2, 5 for 4*5/4, 6 for 4*3/2, 7
> > > for 8*7/8, 9 for 8*9/8, 10 for 8*5/4, 11 for 8*11/8, 12 for 8*3/2
> > > and so on.
> > LilyPond is a notation program first, and your proposal does not map
> > to notation since tuplets also involve choices of beaming and
> > division.
> There's a lot of music that contains tuplets (mainly triplets) without
> tuplet numbers.  Such a notation would simplify things.

In my experience, the triplets in question most often
come in a chain. The three-argument form of \tuplet
(as in \tuplet 3/2 8 { c16 c c c c c }) helps with
those cases.

Having special durations equivalent to multipliers
defeats separation of content and layout through
non-semantic markup since you can't get the tuplet
brackets and numbers back.

I'll also have to admit that my first thought when
reading the original post was: FRACTRAN++!

The point is: smart does not mean user-friendly;
often to the contrary in fact.

Best regards,
Jean


PS: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Fractran++