Hi,
I would like to propose an addition to SMuFL: symbols for notating metrical stress/accent patterns. These are used primarily by musicologists and in educational contexts rather than in scores but they also provide a useful way of communicating ”groove” which is otherwise hard to catch using conventional sheet music.
An early example in ”A Generative Theory of Tonal Music” (Lerdahl/Jackendoff 1983) uses equally sized dots:
The notation later developed into using filled circles of different sizes (generally four, corresponding to levels of metrical stress) and additional ”decorations” signifying accents and ”swing accents”. This is from ”Karaktäristiska låttyper i svensk folkmusiktradition” (Sven Ahlbäck, ~1985, sorry for the poor image quality):
Lundberg/Ternhag 1996:
So basically these are the full-size (major metrical stress) ”balls”:
The same variants should exist for medium and soft stress also, plus a small dot meaning ”unstressed beat indication”. That makes 13 glyphs altogether. Of course it would also be possible to define the balls and the decorations separately and combine them when drawing, if the principles for registration is clear enough.
I don’t know if this falls into the scope of SMuFL but I’d be grateful if they could be considered!
Regards
Erik
