Comments on: Whole Notes, Accidental Signs, Key Signatures (LilyPond Improvements)

By: Paul Morris

Paul Morris — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 03:20:35 +0000

Thanks Doug! Good point about microtonal music, and I agree about the need to make whole notes more prominent. Wider whole notes might also be needed if you had say a triad where the middle note was a whole note and the other two notes were quarter notes. The different note heads would allow you to distinguish the different durations. I suppose that would be fairly rare, and you could just work around it with tied notes. In any case I think they it is more aesthetically pleasing to give them more weight in this way.

By: Doug K

Doug K — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 18:31:57 +0000

Nice work. The bigger whole notes make sense. I’ve always assumed traditional notation uses bigger whole notes so that they aren’t overlooked as easily, because their lack of stems might make them less noticeable than other notes otherwise.

The accidental spacing is a good tweak. Those rare cases you mention are rare indeed! They might happen more often in microtonal music (which is itself rare), in which the “enharmonic equivalents” are actually different pitches.