Re: TECH zgike lerfu

[dmb@PALM.CRAY.COM]

   My first response to Iain's proposal is "Why bother".  As even he admits
"...I suspect that full orchestral scores are best left to their traditional
notation".  But even if we agree that some form of musical notation in Lojban
is desirable, I think that Iain's proposal carries too much Western cultural
baggage for it to qualify as the standard for a culturally neutral language.
I'd prefer to represent each note as a pitch followed by a duration.  Pitch
would be specified as octave and pitch class within the octave seperated by
"pi", the decimal point.  By default, there would be twelve pitch classes to
the octave; but this could be changed via an indication in the header of the
piece.  Similarly duration would be indicated in beats and parts per beat, with
24 parts per beat the default.  The piece header would indicate, at a minimum,
the number of beats per bar.  It could also include tempo in beats per minute,
pitch classes per octave and possibly deviations from equal temperment for the
gamelon ethusiasts or devotees of early music on authentic instruments.  For
convenience, either pitch or duration could be omitted if it was the same as
the preceeding note.  If there is interest, I could formalize these ideas into
a formal proposal, but I'm still not convinced that Lojban needs a musical
notation.