Hidden implicit accidentals and mixed tonality systems with microtonal key signatures

Hi!

I’m converting some existing music from 12 EDO to 53 EDO and mostly it’s been a great experience with the tonality systems features incl. playback. Now, I’ve hit on a kind of an edge case which is, e.g:

  1. The music is in G major, I add a 53edo key signature with a v# on the F (making it ca 16 cents lower) and a vN (down natural) on B and E.
  2. The following pitches partly get new accidentals, but not all of them. The existing B:s and E:s get normal natural accidentals that I have to change to vN accidentals (not a problem). The previous F# however get no accidental, making me assume they are encoded as vF#, but they actually play back like the old 12 EDO F#. The same is true for other pitches without any accidentals and worse for key signatures with more accidentals.
  3. Some pitches that had temporary accidentals now have no accidentals, but still play back as if they had the original 12edo accidental. In my case I had some lydian C#:s that now look like C:s, but sound like 12edo C#:s so the only way I’ve found to spot them is to click on every individual C and check if I’ve fixed it or not.

I also cannot transpose the music until all the pitches in my selection are the same tonality system.

Is there a way to see which pitches belong to which tonality system or to ensure that all of the pitches on a selection belong to the same tonality system?

Unfortunately not, Erik. Adding a new key signature in a new tonality system doesn’t itself update the pitches of all of the ensuing notes. Could you perhaps filter notes by their 12-EDO pitch, pitch by pitch, then use Write > Transpose to transpose them by the appropriate number of divisions?

Thanks Daniel, filtering by 12 EDO pitch does work. What I did was filter by each pitch in the original and then select the 53 EDO accidental it should have. You can consider some kind of tonality system assignment/visualisation per note a feature request then :wink:

Cheers!

The important point is that Dorico identifies accidentals by pitch delta rather than by glyph, and this is a good thing. You’ve noticed that when you change the tonality system of existing notation with accidentals, some or all of them may disappear – they are still there and functioning the same in terms of pitch, just invisible, if they are not defined in the current system.

See this recent thread about an easier method for retuning existing notation, and some issues working with tonality systems.

I agree that the implementation of accidentals/glyphs/pitch delta is good because it seems both robust and flexible, but I think that whenever the visual representation and the underlying representation disagrees on interpretation there should be an explicit warning (maybe a signpost or something).

Thanks for the link. I don’t think it’s applicable though because I’m notating with HEJI2 accidentals in order to play it on my 53 EDO instrument; playback is just very useful to have to check my work and create mockups for collaborators. As I’m using non traditional accidentals I’ll need to change those regardless.