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

[Hans Aberg]

> On 30 Mar 2015, at 23:13, Johnny Farraj <johnnyfarraj at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> The same problem arises in Arab music notation,
> 
> Hi Hans, 
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by that statement? 
> 
> The Arabic half-flat and half-sharp symbols do not mean exact quartertones, but that's understood by Arabic music performers as the exact intonation is then learned by ear. That fact does not make them impractical to use, as they are used extensively in Arabic music notation. 

It has to with the transposable staff notation system: if for example Maqam Sikah as here
  http://www.maqamworld.com/maqamat/sikah.html
is transposed to key E, then one will see an accidental that raises on the F the same amount that the lowering Arab microtonal accidentals.

It is also performed in Sikah Baladi according my pitch measurements of the examples on your site (the link above), similar to Turkish music, but the microtonal offsets larger.

> Johnny
> 
>> On Mar 30, 2015, at 4:54 PM, Hans Aberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The same problem arises in Arab music notation,