Re: Byzantine chant and microtones

[Valentin Villenave]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Erich Patrick Enke
<address@hidden> wrote:
> What I meant to say was: Yes please.  You can feel free to copy paste that 
> email to where it needs to be.  A prime example of Byzantine notation in 
> modern use can be found here: 
> http://www.stanthonysmonastery.org/music/Vespers/b2100_Lord_I_have_cried.pdf

Greetings,
I have added this to our tracker.
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1389

Hopefully someone (maybe you!) will have some concrete ideas on how to
implement this notation model. There's obviously a lot of work to be
done on different levels (glyphs, etc.).

I may be wrong, but I'm not sure that obtaining a purely
interval-based model would be required here; maybe it would be
possible, instead, to hack LilyPond's already-existing paradigm and
produce a "virtual" pitch-based model, that could be made to take any
pitch as a tuning reference; in this way we could use the underlying
architecture for key signatures to produce Byzantine scales, for
example.

Then, of course, a special Engraving context should be created, with
the appropriate glyphs and alignment; but I suspect this wouldn't be
the hardest part.

What we're doing with Turkish classical notation, as Hans mentioned,
could be an interesting starting point:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git;a=blob;f=ly/arabic.ly;hb=HEAD

Good luck!

Valentin.