musescore / musescore/MuseScore

Support more accidental styles

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#19,177 3 comments 5 reactions 2 assignees View on GitHub

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engraving feature request needs design
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Description

Your idea

In "Format → Style", add a dialog to configure the accidentals style to be used in the score.

Lilypond supports no less than 20 accidental styles (https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/displaying-pitches#automatic-accidentals), which might be excessive, but at least these two should be implemented, since they are the most used nowadays:

modern
This rule corresponds to the common practice in the twentieth century. It omits some extra natural signs, which were traditionally prefixed to a sharp following a double sharp, or a flat following a double flat. The modern rule prints the same accidentals as default, with two additions that serve to avoid ambiguity: after temporary accidentals, cancellation marks are printed also in the following measure (for notes in the same octave) and, in the same measure, for notes in other octaves.

neo-modern
This rule reproduces a common practice in contemporary music: accidentals are printed like with modern, but they are printed again if the same note appears later in the same measure – except if the note is immediately repeated.

Problem to be solved

Although there are many different conventions on how to typeset accidentals, currently MuseScore only implements one accidentals style, namely the one following the rules of eighteenth-century common practice. These conventions are inadequate and inconvenient for notating much of the music of the last 100+ years.

There is a plugin called "Add Courtesy Accidentals", but it only includes "dodecaphonic style", which isn't very useful.

I think this should be defined in the style of the score. And the name "courtesy accidentals" is also not correct, it's not about "courtesy" but rather what set of rules or conventions will be applied for accidentals.

Prior art

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