Co-sponsoring Turkish notation support

[Adam Good]

Hi I'm Adam Good, musician of Balkan, Turkish, Eastern European  
music. I've been in contact with Han-Wen regarding some major support  
in Lilypond for Turkish music which can be considered a microtonal  
music. It would be fantastic to be able to create charts for Turkish  
Classical or Ottoman music. As it is now, Lilypond can get close but  
is still rather limited.

As Han-Wen describes below there are some new accidental characters  
that need creating. Plus technical issues getting to the microtonal  
aspect that is so specific to Turkish music. Please read Han-Wen's  
message. If anyone has some musical questions RE: Turkish music  
theory please feel free to ask.

Please let us know if you are interested in contributing financially  
to the work that needs to be done.

all the best,
Adam Good
--
www.adamgood.com

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(message from Han-Wen)

Hi,

I've been in contact with Adam Good. Adam would like to typeset
Turkish music, which comes with its own set of microtones, and
accompanying glyphs.  Turkish music divides the whole tone in 9 equal
parts, and has accidentals for 1, 4, 5 and 8 ninths of a tone.

There are many systems for defining and printing microtones; for
example, there has been recent discussion on Helmholtz-Ellis notation,
which uses with many subdivisions of the whole tone.

In my opinion, it would be best if Lily were extended with a generic
mechanism for entering and printing microtones, so we can support
arbitrary styles.  This is possible, since all microtonal notation
uses the diatonic scale as a basis, and adds different signs for
microtonal alterations to that.

With this in mind, I propose the following solution

- replace the current "alteration" field of pitch (+2 = sharp, -4 =
double flat), with a pitch-bend field (+100 = sharp, -200 = double
flat, +50 quarter tone sharp, etc.)

- replace the printing mechanisms of key signature and accidentals to
support a microtonalAlteration property, which spells out which symbol
to use for which microtonal pitch.

- add syntax to change the pitch bend of every note, eg.

  c4\bend #50

(this make a quarter tone sharp C)

- LilyPond already plays quarter tones through MIDI, and this
functionality will remain for general microtones.

With this in place, I add support for whichever glyphs people would
like for their favorite microtonal notation in a simple manner.

I don't think any other notation software supports microtones
properly, so this functionality would make LilyPond the #1 program for
microtonal music. For that reason, I would really like to add this.
I've set the price for the above work (excluding glyphs) at 450 EUR
(incl VAT or money transfer costs).  I think that the implementation
will be pretty straightforward, but since the change is pretty
fundamental, I expect a lot of small fixes to get everything working
again.