arabic / turkish / persian (and other ?) accidentals

[Gunther Lippens]

Hi,

As a composer/arranger I like Lilypond quite a lot, but a serious drawback for
me that it isn't possible to write music with the (quite a lot used) turkish
accidentals, I'm performing turkish  music myself.

Up til now, Lilypond only supports two accidental-symbols mapping a quarter tone
up and a quarter tone down. I read some mails on the mailinglists (by typing
"turkish") e.g. and two major problems pop up : 

1/  quite some accidentals which are used by eastern musicians cannot be
engraved yet. Turkish classical music needs five types of flats and five types
of sharps. Arabic classical music uses some of these symbols used by the turkish
community, but these accidentals have a different meaning. Iranian musicians use
other accidentals (triangle-like accidentals : e.g. the koron). Turkish folk
musicians need accidentals with a numer above (just like a power function in
math) : si-bemol^{2} and si-bemol^{3} where the number indicates how many commas
(a comma being 1/53rd of an octave).

2/  with this plethora of symbols and meanings, quite a lot of difficulties
arise when wanting to map one of these accidentals to a tuning. A typical
example is arabic classical music where musicians from different countries play
the same piece of music from the same composer with the same score with the same
accidentals, yet their tuning of the "quarter tones" differs.

In order to keep things practical, I think it would be a great step forward if
these accidentals would be engravable without worrying about the tuning, that
is, as a first step. I saw that many people on the lists wanted to combine
midi-tuning and implementation of accidentals right away, I think the problem is
too complicated. Unless you let the user decide what the meaning of an
accidental is (e.g. by typing eseh35 instead of eseh, which could mean a
quartertone lowering 35 cents).


Greetings,

Gunther