Re: Auto-beaming infrastructure redo

[Hans Aberg]

On 3 Jul 2010, at 20:20, Carl Sorensen wrote:

> > The meter mentioned before, 12 = 3+2+2+3+2 with quadruplets, is very
> > popular in the historical region of Macedonia, on both the Macedonian
> > and the Greek side (though a lot seems to play it in 16 = 4+2+3+4+3).
> > There is a music example here, listening for especially at about time
> > 2:00 and after.
> >   ...
>
> I couldn't find the music example at this URL.

Typo. It should be:
  http://www.ethnicdance.net/ethnicmusic/www/play_bufskoto.ram

> > Also see:
> >   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leventikos
> >
> > So here, to get subbeaming expressing the musical pattern, one might
> > want to write the meter as
> >   ((4:3)(2+2) + (2 + 2)) + ((4:3)(2+2) + 2) * 1/16
> >
> > It is possible to sometimes have quadruplets on the 3s, and sometimes
> > not. For example, in the original version of Makedonsko Devojce,  
> > which
> > is in 7 = 3+2+2. So one might want ot have more patterns:
> >   3+(2+2) * 1/16
> >   (4:3)(2+2) + (2+2) * 1/16
>
> Thank you for this explanation.  But what I wanted is not a specific  
> musical
> example of such a meter, but a specific example of the notes in a  
> measure
> and the desired beaming.
>
> If you have quadruplets on the 3s, do you want to have the two  
> halves of the
> quadruplet beamed separately, i.e. do you want to have a quadruplet  
> bracket
> across two beamed pairs of 32nd notes?  I wouldn't have expected  
> that.  I
> would have expected that you would want to have 4 32nd notes beamed  
> as a
> group with a tuplet number of 4 above the beam.

Sorry, I though it was clear that the meter specification above  
indicate what beaming one prefers. One could use both, depending of  
the taste of the typesetter. So I have examples of of Bulgarian  
kopanitsas typeset both as (2+2)+3+(2+2) and 4+3+4. In both cases,  
there are three groups with space between them. In the first case  
(2+2)+3+(2+2), the middle of the first and last group (2+2) have the  
second level bems broken up. In the second case 4+3+4, they are  
unbroken.

So as for the quadruplets, the 1/16 level within the 4:3 quadruplets  
could be similarly broken up or unbroken, depending on how detailed  
one wants to be with the accent subpatterns. (In the example above, in  
the beginning, they play it as though unbroken, but later, at time  
2:00, they start to play it as broken up.)

If I want to have them broken up, I write as above
  ((4:3)(2+2) + (2 + 2)) + ((4:3)(2+2) + 2) * 1/16
If I want them unbroken I write
  ((4:3)4 + (2 + 2)) + ((4:3)4 + 2) * 1/16

In the second case, the 4 is the what I called the simple meter  
component, formally a primary accent on the first beat and secondary  
accents on the other beats.

So the + defines both a metric accent hierarchy and a beaming  
structure. So one could tie them together, only noting that in  
typesetting, different note patterns may use different + expression  
patterns.

  Hans