[MEI-L] Beat in 6/8

[Laurent Pugin]

I saw the examples in Behind Bars. It indeed works if we assume that a
<beatRpt> is actually a "<beamRpt>". I have the feeling, however, that this
would to be too restrictive. One idea that came to my mind is to have an
attribute in beatRpt for specifying how many beats the repeat covers, if
not 1. in 6/8, this attribute would need to be 3 for repeats of 4. . That
way we stay compliant with what is assumed with timestamps. It also has the
advantage of enabling repeats that could be less than a beat. For example
repeats of a beam of four 16th in 2/2 (if this can ever happen). Of course,
this would be a solution specifically for beatRpt and does not solve the
issue at a more general level.

Laurent

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 4:03 PM, Byrd, Donald A. <donbyrd at indiana.edu>
wrote:

> Executive summary: In 6/8 specifically, I think it should be a dotted
> quarter, not an eighth. Now some discussion of the issues:
>
> I think most of us would agree that whether the beat is an 8th or a dotted
> quarter in 6/8 (or 9/8, 12/8, etc.) depends mostly on the tempo, but I
> doubt if we want to infer that from metronome marks, much less verbal tempo
> indications! FWIW, I'd guess the dotted-quarter beat is more common.
>
> Of course the same question arises in compound meters with denominators
> other than 8. Is the beat in 9/16 a 16th or a dotted 8th? It even worse in
> irregular meters. In 5/8, a measure might have five beats of an 8th each,
> or a quarter followed by a dotted quarter, or a dotted quarter followed by
> a quarter!
>
> But in _Behind Bars_, p. 230, Gould solves the problem in terms of
> notation with the rule that a single diagonal line means to repeat the
> previous beamed group of total duration of a quarter (or dotted quarter),
> two diagonal lines a duration of an 8th (or dotted 8th),  three diagonal
> lines a duration of… You get the idea. So, while she calls these beat
> repeats, she defines them in terms of beaming! But of course she's talking
> about usage for new scores,  not what appears in Weber or Beethoven or
> whever's manuscripts!
>
> --Don
>
>
> On Aug 26, 2015, at 2:22 AM, Laurent Pugin <lxpugin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am looking at beat repeats (<beatRpt>) and I am not sure how to deal
> with them in 6/8 (or 9/8, etc). Defining the beat in 6/8 is a recurrent
> issue. Looking at timestamps, it seems that each 8th has to be considered
> as a beat. But in the beatRpt examples in the guidelines it seems that a
> 4.th is considered as a beat.
> >
> > Considering that the number of slashes have to be encoded in the @rend
> attribute, rendering the beat repeats properly is not that much of an issue
> because we could just ignore the beat duration and just display the dashes.
> (Only rendering repeats of mixed duration values would be an issue since it
> is not clear how this has to be encoded.) However, this would not work if
> we need to align them with other voices, for example. Any recommendation on
> this particular issue (<beatRpt>) and on how to consider beats in 6/8 in
> general?
> >
> > Best,
> > Laurent
> > _______________________________________________
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> > mei-l at lists.uni-paderborn.de
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>
> ---
> Donald Byrd
> Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellow
> Adjunct Associate Professor of Informatics
> Visiting Scientist, Research Technologies
> Indiana University Bloomington
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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