preliminary proposal: New Unicode characters for Arabic music half-flat and half-sharp

[Michael Everson]

On 29 Mar 2015, at 23:29, Garth Wallace <gwalla at gmail.com> wrote:

> Right, I was just pointing out that Turkish music is a potential
> complication if changing the glyph for MUSICAL SYMBOL QUARTER TONE
> FLAT.
> 
> Here's how I understand it:
> Arabic music - uses the flat-with-stroke exclusively as a quarter tone flat
> Western quarter tone music - uses the reversed flat and
> flat-with-stroke interchangeably as a quarter tone flat, but the
> reversed flat is more common
> Turkish music - uses both the reversed flat and flat-with-stroke
> contrastively (neither, strictly speaking, as a quarter tone flat
> since quarter tones do not exist in Turkish music)

That’s quite some variety. There are also the three-quarter flat and sharp in Western music to consider. I’ll be able to dig into this after I get back to Ireland from Sweden on Friday.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/