Re: SMuFL Chromatic Solfege

On 1/12/2018 5:32 PM, Marek Ledvina wrote:
> Hello Joe,
> 
> We are currently working on solfege exercises and found out that SMuFL 
> is completely missing the chromatic solfege syllables “note heads" like 
> you can find it for example here 
> http://openmusictheory.com/chromaticSolfege.html
> 
> Current Bravura only contains scale degrees ( 7 ) syllables ( do, re, 
> mi, fa, sol, la, ti [si] ) which is nice start but not usable for 
> teaching materials.
> 
> We need  “do, di, re, ri, mi, fa, fi, so(l), si, la, li, ti, (do)” and 
> “do, ti, te, la, le so(l), se, fa, mi, me, re, ra do"
> 
> Can I ask anyone to include them into SMuFL Bravura font?
> 
> Thank you very much, Marek.


I've noticed the lack of solfege support in those noteheads also, when 
looking for characters for the very related topic of the various tonic 
sol-fa and numbered notations.  While the simplest forms of tonic sol-fa 
were designed to be "typeset" by using a typewriter


|  do re mi  - |

|   1  2  3  - |


other forms use a bit more complex notation.  There is some information 
about numbered note systems in Wikipedia[1][2][3].

While even much of the more complex notations can be produced with 
various carriage movements on a typewriter, the development of 
proportional fonts, makes it harder to achieve proper overstriking for a 
consistent look using modern technology. Some of the fonts do a better 
job than others, and one, Doulos Cipher[4] from SIL, makes a good try at 
being pretty complete, but it uses graphite font technology, which has 
somewhat limited support.

There are a fair number of variations in numbered note systems popularly 
used from place to place, with some special symbols not found in most 
fonts designed for orthography, making it somewhat hard to find an 
appropriate font for the numbered note systems. Wikipedia doesn't seem 
to delve into the regional differences between variations, nor does it 
include sufficient detail about any one of them to be confident of 
completeness of usage or rules in their articles.

I have various samples of numbered notation used together with lyrics, 
and some include it between the staves of CWMN (using ordinary 
noteheads). Other samples show four-part harmony using do re mi, 
together with lyrics. But while samples of usage are great, and many of 
the usages can be figured out by examining those examples, it would be 
great to find a complete exposition of the rules for various variations. 
I'm presently going by some of what Wikipedia says, some by the various 
samples I have, and some by asking questions of people that use the 
notation (but they are not likely true experts on the notation).

Because each note may have a cluster of other symbols around it, it 
seemed to be that the easiest way to achieve support in a variety of 
contexts and applications would be to custom design a font with the 
following characteristics:

1. The numbers are centered, and non-spacing.
2. Various dots, double dots, overbars, underbars, and accidentals, and 
fermatas that are placed above, below, or to the left of the basic 
number should be positioned on the same alignment point, and also be 
non-spacing.
3. Hyphens and dots that follow the notes could have the same alignment 
point for the first one, but then space over sufficiently that using 
them again would produce normally-spaced appearance.
4. Additional "normal" characters might be included to allow creation of 
the various notations for specifying key signatures and time signatures.

The above would suffice for a notation application.  While I chose a 
centered alignment point, the techniques would work equally well for any 
other alignment point, as long as the relative positioning of the 
characters were appropriate to their use, and they were non-spacing.

For use in a text application, each group of characters forming a note 
group would then be followed by an appropriate width space to "complete" 
the group, and maybe another one or two to reach an minimally spaced 
point to start another group, or, of course, even more spacing to reach 
parity with associated lyrics on a nearby line.

It appears the Doulos Cipher font uses Graphite for combining characters 
(a more complex solution to character overlays than non-spacing, but 
perhaps more limited in total number of combined characters?), and to 
achieve some level of support for longer beams and slurs to also be 
positioned as "slur tips" with a note group, and in the appropriate 
software that includes Graphite, complete slurs would appear.

Not finding support for numbered notation systems in SMuFL, and not 
finding any existing font that had sufficient documentation, character 
set, and quality for a current project, I described the above needs to a 
friend who cobbled together a font using characters from existing public 
domain sources, and repositioned their alignment points and widths to 
achieve the above characteristics. It works well in my notation 
application (under development, and mostly using SMuFL), together with 
the slur and beam drawing support in that application. I likely didn't 
find and include all the characters that might be needed for full 
support of various numbered notation systems, but I did include 
everything I needed for a current project, and a bit more for 
potentially similar projects.

I didn't find any standard codepoints for such characters or uses, and 
fear that our font, if released to the public, will contribute to the 
music font mojibake that SMuFL is attempting to correct.  Is there any 
support for the idea of including a range of characters for numbered 
notation systems within SMuFL?  I'd be happy to adjust my current font 
and application to conform to such a range if it existed.  I did 
currently pick a range high in the private use area that SMuFL is 
targeting, not currently used by SMuFL, but there may be reasons I'm 
unaware of that would make it not be the best range.  There is some 
redundancy with some SMuFL characters, done to allow for them to be 
non-spacing, and have alignment points that make the spacing 
calculations for the numbered notation simple.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_musical_notation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_sol-fa
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamelan_notation
[4] http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ciphermusic

Received on Saturday, 13 January 2018 08:17:16 UTC