does anybody know about these accidentals?

[Werner LEMBERG]

>>> What specifically would you like to know about these accidentals?
>>> What do you "wonder about the origin of" [these two characters]?
>>> If you would write a message with your questions, I will post that
>>> in these two foums.
>>
>> Even though one example was given here upthread, a score where it
>> is used, it is hard to find any other examples of it by searches.
>> At the same time, Unicode does not have much of microtonal
>> accidentals, so it is curious it ending up in it.  So the question
>> is what is its origin?
> 
> So it sounds like this is a "history of music notation" question,
> rather than a character encoding question.  And it looks like this
> is just passing on the question from @gro-tsen.bsky.social, rather
> than asking a different question. Is this the question to be passed
> on to the W3C Music Notation Community Group and the MEI group?

Good question.  I think the issue is primarily related to Unicode – in
a proposal, there should (or should I say 'must'?) be a reference to
or a scan of a document that clearly shows why a character is going to
be included into the standard.  For the two accidentals in question it
turned out that the original proposal from 1998 doesn't fulfill this
requirement.  It may have been 'obvious' then to include the
particular shapes, however, it is no longer the case.

Given that there is a new proposal to add more microtonal accidentals
to Unicode, the main question is whether there should be a single
character code for 'an accidental that raises a sharp by a quarter
tone' (and analogous cases) or not.  As SMuFL demonstrates, there is
more than a single glyph shape for this, which makes it a non-trivial
decision.

It is quite unfortunate that the shown shapes of the currently
available Unicode microtone accidendals are probably the least used
today.

>> I am passing on a second-hand question from @gro-tsen.bsky.social
>> [8] about the origin and history of two quarter-tone accidentals.
>> They were used in at least one score in the 1990s[6][7], and were
>> incorporated into SMuFL and Unicode.  Can anybody shed light on the
>> origin and history of these accidentals?  [...]

Sounds good, thanks.

Note, however, that the author of the original proposal replied
already, saying that he had notes then, but they are lost now.  I
think that further questions will probably help dig out more examples
printed before 1998, which is certainly beneficial.


    Werner