[OT] Fractions on musical notation

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:35:39 -0300, Neil Cerutti <horpner at yahoo.com>  
escribió:

> On 2007-12-17, Gabriel Genellina <gagsl-py2 at yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
>> On 16 dic, 06:40, Lie <Lie.1... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> [btw, off topic, in music, isn't 1/4 and 2/8 different? I'm not very
>>> keen of music though, so correct me if I'm wrong.]
>>
>> As a time signature 1/4 has no sense, but 3/4 and 6/8 are
>> different things. In the standard musical notation both numbers
>> are written one above the other, and no "division" line is
>> used. Note that they just *look* like a fraction when written
>> in text form, like here, because it's not easy to write one
>> above the other. 3/4 is read as "three by four", not "three
>> quarters" -at least in my country- so there is even less
>> confussion.
>
> Time signatures are crap. They should have switched to a number
> over a note value a long time ago; we could have easily avoided
> abominable travesties like the time signature on the 2nd
> movement of Beethoven's 9th (B needed four over dotted quarter). If
> music notation had been invented by a computer scientist we
> wouldn't be stuck in the current mess in which 6/8 means two
> completely different meters (3 over quarter, or 2 over dotted
> quarter).

That was proposed by (some great musician from XIX century that I can't  
remember) but it's hard to change habits.
The idea was to use: above, number of beats, and below, the note lasting  
one beat, *always*. So conventional 6/8 would be 2/"dotted quarter" with a  
dotted quarted drawn as itself, not implied by a number. This allows for  
more meaningful signatures, like 3+3+2/"eight note" for some Piazzolla  
tangos that are now written as 4/4 (but don't have the stress pattern for  
4/4 at all).

> And... er... Python doesn't need a time signature data type. But
> rationals would be quite nifty. ;-)

I'm happy enough with rationals as 3rd party library (like gmpy)

-- 
Gabriel Genellina