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[OT] Fractions on musical notation

Neil Cerutti horpner at yahoo.com
Mon Dec 17 08:35:39 EST 2007 
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).

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

-- 
Neil Cerutti
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