Representing Sagittal in plain text

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Dave Keenan
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Representing Sagittal in plain text

Post by Dave Keenan »

In the Facebook 22-Tone Workgroup at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/3701224 ... 598293013/
William Lynch wrote:Juhani I thought u said we don't need both symbols. I wanted to use ^ v ^# vb b and #, mixed sagittal. I have no concern anymore for universality. I'm mostly concerned with 22 edo so we dont need ^ AND /. Sigh, these discussions are getting to be mundane because everyone is now so concerned with a system that works for every tuning that we dont seem to be getting anywhere with 22 edo. :( sorry if I'm complaining too much
Hi William. I don't blame you for being confused about the usage of ^ and / in that thread. Rest assured that no-one is suggesting changing which Sagittal accidental is used for 22edo (in the Bravura MSS font), namely :/|:, but it seems there was an overnight change in which character was being used to represent that Sagittal accidental in plain text. From ^ to /.

And there is good reason to do so. Whenever anyone needs to represent a single new accidental-pair in plain text (or ASCII), they usually choose ^ and v, for obvious reasons. But when we start needing more accidentals, for other tunings, we have to be a bit more choosy, because the selection of suitable plain-text characters is fairly limited. With Sagittal, in this case, we chose plain-text characters that look like the font character with its vertical shaft removed. So :/|: becomes /. And :/|\: becomes ^. I know you're not using :/|\:, but people who are using it, in say JI or in EDOs 17, 24, 31 and many others, may assume you are using :/|\: rather than :/|:, if you use ^ in plain text.

Of course you could avoid the problem completely by using this forum, where you can just use the real Sagittal symbol by clicking on it in a palette, like an emoticon, as I have done above, or by typing it as ":/|:" (without the quotes). I note that you can also see how the Sagittal symbols above are pronounced, by holding the point of your cursor over them.
William Lynch
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Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2015 9:27 pm

Re: Representing Sagittal in plain text

Post by William Lynch »

Yeah, I now see the point of this, this system is so much better than I had imagined. We finally are goIng to be able to talk about music in an intervallic, easy to speak system that sounds more fun and Sci-fi than it does academically dull or overly technical :)
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