Poor editing and filtering in microtonal tonality systems

Dorico
1

It is unfortunate that when the pitch delta of an accidental in a Tonality System is edited, even by a tiny bit, like one step in 12,000EDO (0.1 cents), all those accidentals disappear from the score. Filter Notes by Pitch doesn’t work in a microtonal tonality system, and the notes that are now without accidentals are not in fact uninflected, and cannot be selected with the filter. So now that i corrected a wrong pitch delta of an accidental in my Tonality System, I have to go through the score note by note and manually put the accidental back to hundreds of notes that I have to identify first because some of, say, F’s are actual F’s and not F’s with a missing microtonal accidental.

2

The good thing about the way this works is that Dorico maintains the pitch delta assigned to a note unless it is changed. If there is no accidental in the current system that matches that delta, none is displayed – but playback is unaffected.

It is a pain to have to reassign an accidental to so many notes. Here’s what I do: Create a temporary accidental that’s huge and bold (like a b in Arial Black or something) and set that to the erroneous pitch delta. That will help you find all the occurrences, and when you’ve fixed them, you can delete it.

1 Like
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Thanks, that’s a good idea. Unfortunately it didn’t work in my case because the accidentals I needed to edit had not only a wrong deltas but a wrong EDO cardinality - a remainder from some older palette, I suppose; it shouldn’t even be possible. When I edited them and changed the notehead as you suggested, the EDO value changed by itself to the correct one, and the accidentals disappeard from the score. However, I was able to create the correct accidental, identical to the exisstng one but with the right delta, and find all instances in the score and change them to the new accidental, identical but the next item in the palette. - Years ago, I suggested 'Filter all notes on the same staff line / position" to help with the non-existing filtering of microtonal pitches but this has not been implemented yet.