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

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

On 3/30/2015 1:54 PM, Hans Aberg wrote:
>> On 30 Mar 2015, at 00:49, Asmus Freytag (t) <asmus-inc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>
>> It would be worth to bring the collection of music symbols up to a more comprehensive set in one go, rather than to do it piecemeal.
> There is a similar issue to that of the math symbols, namely, one might add some which are not actually in use currently,

That is not what I had intended to imply, rather that the collection of 
music symbols encoded today might have left out a considerable number of 
lesser-used (not: never-used) symbols.

The emphasis was on making sure that attested symbols don't dribble in; 
the recommendation would be to make a concerted effort to collect and 
process them in the largest chunks that are reasonably feasible.
> added for future completeness:
>
> Persian music notation uses two microtonal accidentals: the lowering koron and the raising sori.
>    http://www.smufl.org/version/latest/range/persianAccidentals/
>
> Then intervals which will result in combinations of these are performed but not currently notated. This would be similar to the standard accidentals: koron-koron, koron-sori, and sori-sori.
>
> In addition, these accidentals are not exact quartertones, which means that a lowering of the sori interval is not a koron, and raising a koron interval is not a sori. The reason they are not present in Persian notation, is that one usually do not transpose, but it is easy to do that in modern music computer engraving programs, so it might be nice to have them for that reason.

I could see additions like that if "modern music computer engraving 
program" suppliers were making a representation that this would solve a 
real or closely anticipated problem (and that they and the community of 
their users would expect to be able to use such symbols).

A mere observation that these might "logically" exist, I would find much 
less compelling.
>
> The same problem arises in Arab music notation, but possibly one might use some already present Western microtonal accidentals there.

Again, if there's a consensus by practitioners that such notation is 
required, that would be one thing; mere speculation about them being 
logically necessary doesn't carry the same weight, because we know of 
many examples where actual practice ended up with illogical notation.

A./
>
>> On 3/29/2015 3:07 PM, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>> You should check the Standard Music Font Layout (SmuFL) for details;
>>> it also has a freely available font that covers it.
>>>
>>>    http://www.smufl.org
>>>
>>> The recent version of the specification can be found at
>>>
>>>    http://www.smufl.org/files/smufl-1.12.pdf
>>>
>>>       Werner
>>>
>
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