Re: Enhancement: Non-power-of-2 note values

[Simon Albrecht]

On 25.11.2015 23:45, Noeck wrote:
> Hi Simon,
>
> > do we have an issue in the tracker for notation like
> > \relative { c'8  d24 c d }
> > instead of
> > \relative { c'8  d16*2/3 c d }
> > ?
> How should it be defined what the shown duration is?

Well, the most common use case is a triplet without indication (like 
when you indicate the tuplets in the first bar only). And it’s pretty 
straightforward that a 24th note is 1/24 the duration of a whole note.

> Always 2/3 of the duration* if the duration is of the form 3*2^n?
> Or the next smaller power of 2?
> Would d25 or d15 also be allowed?

The question is: why not? We can document it appropriately, and then it 
would be the user’s responsibility to choose sensible values, of course, 
but generally it seems to me to be well-defined.
A 16th quintuplet could be written as a 20, as there are 20 of them to a 
whole note.
And we already have time signatures with non-power-of-2 denominators 
supported, such as occur in complex modern music.

> This looks like a very mathematically and programming-wise inspired
> feature request to me. Some syntactic sugar for a rare use case which is
> much more understandable if written as 16*2/3.

I think it’s not so difficult to understand, and music theory, such as 
we have to know when writing LilyPond code, certainly features 
mathematical aspects.
The use case of ‘implicit tuplets’ is not quite so rare, and it’s 
tedious to write alternations of 16*2/3 and 8, much more so than of 24 
and 8.

Yours, Simon