JI Notation Spreadsheet

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George Secor
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JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by George Secor »

[Note that this is an old version of the spreadsheet. For an updated version, see viewtopic.php?p=4457#p4457 (later in this thread)]
Sagittal-JI.xls
Sagittal JI notation for factored ratio
(181.5 KiB) Downloaded 1232 times
Eight years ago I created a spreadsheet that computes Sagittal notation for any factored JI ratio (up to the 61 prime limit) at 4 different levels of precision. See attachment "Sagittal-JI.xls". Enter a (signed) integer corresponding to a prime factor into each of the cyan-colored cells below each prime number. The mixed Sagittal notation appears in the colored cells from A9 thru E15.
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Dave Keenan
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by Dave Keenan »

Thanks George. How hard would it be to add a one-symbol-per-prime notation to that? Or should that be the subject of a separate spreadsheet?
Juhani
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by Juhani »

And would it be possible to make a version, possibly an online calculator on this forum, with actual Sagittal accidentals rather than the extremely-unpleasant-to-read and off-putting ASCII symbols? - I now got the Spreadsheet working, though, I don't know what the problem was previously: it didn't calculate anything. It's an excellent tool! It would be great if there were a Sagittal notation calculator with staff notation, the actual accidentals (and perhaps, the Sagispeak names), as well as playback. Such a program already exists for the Sabat JI notation system.
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by Dave Keenan »

Juhani wrote:And would it be possible to make a version, possibly an online calculator on this forum, with actual Sagittal accidentals rather than the extremely-unpleasant-to-read and off-putting ASCII symbols? - I now got the Spreadsheet working, though, I don't know what the problem was previously: it didn't calculate anything. It's an excellent tool! It would be great if there were a Sagittal notation calculator with staff notation, the actual accidentals (and perhaps, the Sagispeak names), as well as playback. Such a program already exists for the Sabat JI notation system.
Hi Juhani,

Glad to hear you got it working. It would be fairly straightforward for anyone with a little familiarity with Excel, to make George's spreadsheet display the accidentals as the proper strings of symbols from the Bravura font. It would require that the user install the Bravura font on their computer prior to using the spreadsheet. The conversion would only require laboriously working through the lookup tables where the ASCII symbols appear, in columns V W AA AB AF AG AK AL and replacing them with the corresponding Bravura characters. It might make sense to have two copies of the spreadsheet open side-by-side, to read one and modify the other.

For many years now it has been possible to use Manuel Op de Coul's Scala program to display Sagittal notation on the staff, mixed or pure, for any of the four JI precision levels (as well as for EDOs). Unfortunately it doesn't do multi-Sagittal, although I'm guessing that might be fairly easy for Manuel to implement, if enough people asked him nicely. We clearly underestimated the interest in that.

Yes, an online notation calculator that didn't require the full complexity of Scala would be nice. But I'm afraid it's outside my skillset. I hope someone reading this will volunteer. I'm sorry I still haven't got onto an Apple Mac to try the SvS JI calculator.
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George Secor
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by George Secor »

I have made a minor update to the Sagittal JI spreadsheet that resolves a problem associated with the one-symbol-per-prime notation. Previously there was no way to distinguish 41C (81:82) from 5C (80:81), which were represented by the same symbol :/|: at the olympian (or extreme precision) level. By defining the symbol boundaries using 809-EDA (magrathean) rather than 233-EDA (olympian) values, the lower boundary for :/|: is increased slightly so that 41C is now notated by :/|: :.: without affecting any of the olympian-level symbol definitions.

[Note that this is an old version of the spreadsheet. For an updated version, see viewtopic.php?p=4457#p4457 (later in this thread)]
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Sagittal-JI.xls
Sagittal JI notation for factored ratio
(107.5 KiB) Downloaded 1318 times
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cmloegcmluin
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by cmloegcmluin »

I volunteer to build an online Sagittal notation calculator, as they've got for Helmholtz-Ellis: https://www.plainsound.org/HEJI/. I've found the Sagittal calculator spreadsheet download/file.php?id=28 and that Scala also calculates it, but they have some issues and limitations, and any overhead we can reduce in getting folks to understand, appreciate, and use Sagittal is worth going after.

I'm a web developer so this is in my wheelhouse. I will loop in @JacobBarton when I get started, since I reached out to him elsewhere and discovered he'd made some efforts toward this himself already.
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by Dave Keenan »

cmloegcmluin wrote: Fri Mar 20, 2020 9:13 am I volunteer to build an online Sagittal notation calculator, as they've got for Helmholtz-Ellis: https://www.plainsound.org/HEJI/. I've found the Sagittal calculator spreadsheet download/file.php?id=28 and that Scala also calculates it, but they have some issues and limitations, and any overhead we can reduce in getting folks to understand, appreciate, and use Sagittal is worth going after.

I'm a web developer so this is in my wheelhouse. I will loop in @JacobBarton when I get started, since I reached out to him elsewhere and discovered he'd made some efforts toward this himself already.
Oh man. You are a godsend. Thank you so much! : D

Yes. @JacobBarton has been a wonderful Sagittal educator and facilitator, as has @cam.taylor. Thanks guys.
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by cmloegcmluin »

Jacob and I go way back. I met him in 2011 when I attended the first Xenharmonic Praxis Summer Camp, which he was co-organizing, and at which Sagittal was advocated as the official notation system. I know he's built another tool for Sagittal, "Sagibelius", and I also know he's been web developing lately, so I think it's a great match.

Cam I have seen around doing some interesting stuff but I have not yet made his acquaintance. Hi Cam!
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cmloegcmluin
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by cmloegcmluin »

Please let me know if anyone thinks it would be valuable for me — in addition to building an online web calculator for Sagittal — to update the existing spreadsheet with the following:
  1. update the Plain Text Longform it generates per recent developments re: the new Olympian diacritics
  2. removing George's "Easter Eggs" (Dave's term for the less-obvious functionality it boasts for adjusting the prime limit for the medium precision level, causing some new commas to appear and some symbols to get shuffled subtly around... potentially more confusing than it is valuable)
  3. to help you decide among the 2-3 suggestions it gives for each input pitch, have the calculator tell you how many fifths away that nominal is
  4. to remove the message inside saying "The herculean & olympian levels are highly recommended." because it sends a conflicting message to what is stated in the Xenharmonikon article: "It is expected that the overwhelming majority of users will conclude that the athenian JI symbol set is quite acceptable for their purposes, with higher precision symbol sets being necessary only for certain theoretical (or other special) applications."
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cmloegcmluin
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Re: JI Notation Spreadsheet

Post by cmloegcmluin »

@Dave Keenan I think something on this thread must have gotten messed up. Is this one of those dreaded instances of accidentally clicking the Edit button for a post instead of the Reply button?

I recall posting here listing a few things I planned to change on the JI Notation Spreadsheet. Another thing I wanted to tweak just occurred to me and I came here to tack it on (since I hadn't received any notification that you'd responded yet), only to find things not in the state I left them. It looks like I replied to myself, though context clues suggest that it's actually you replying as me, and the thing you're replying to is gone!

Any chance you can get back what I had here before? If not, it's no big deal. I pretty much remember what it was (new Olympian diacritics, Easter eggs, marking closest nominal).

In any case, the fourth thing I was going to add is that it could let you know whether the default value for the symbol it's suggesting is an exact match, or if not, how many cents it is off by.
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