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Re: Alternating time signatures


From: Urs Liska
Subject: Re: Alternating time signatures
Date: Thu, 08 May 2014 12:34:59 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.5.0

Am 08.05.2014 11:26, schrieb David Kastrup:
Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

Hi,

in my current examination of polymetrics I stumbled over a missing
item in LilyPond: alternating time signatures.

In contemporary notation (well, actually starting quite early in the
20th century, so "contemporary" isn't really adequate) it's a common
concept to write sth like

6 5
8 8

to indicate a section with (irregularly) changing meters.

This can easily be achieved by overriding the TimeSignature stencil,
but as far as I can tell there is no suitable documentation for this.

Huh.  You can do

{
   \once\override Staff.TimeSignature.stencil =
   #(lambda (grob)
     (grob-interpret-markup grob
      #{ \markup \number \override #'(baseline-skip . 0)
      { \column { 6 8 } \column { 5 8 } } #}))
   \time 6/8
   \cadenzaOn
   c1
}

but that's sort of cumbersome.

There _had_ been a snippet to achieve

6   5
   +
8   8

which is a different thing but could easily be adapted.

Maybe one should provide more control over the formatting here.  Like
being able to specify the separating markup (hardwired to "+").

b)
Create a new command for LilyPond itself, as a complement to
\compoundTimeSignature and write appropriate documentation.

I prefer solution b) but will only create a patch if I can expect not
to get objections about the usefulness in itself.

Problem is that this is then again a special case.  Probably makes sense
only with unmetered music.  I'm currently working on some preliminary
patch that makes \bar "anything-but-an-empty-string" advance the bar
counter in unmetered music in order to get sane semantics for
accidentals, bar numbers and so on.  But it's not working properly yet.

You would probably need something like that anyway (LSR333 does no
longer work).


No, I wouldn't need anything like that.
The idea (how I would suggest to enter this kind of alternating meters) is:
- Print the combined time signature once
- hide the time signatures for the following music
- use \time just as normal, with all implications to beaming, beatStructure etc.

Other than with \compoundMeter the printed time signature does not really affect the music. I would simply make the first part of it the effective \time by default.

But my question is actually about the "special case". I think this kind of notation is common enough to warrant a dedicated LilyPond command. But if there is no consensus about this I wouldn't take the trouble and create a patch but rather add it to the snippets.

Urs



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