Hello, everyone, and I am pleased to announce that indeed Dave Keenan
and George Secor have been richly honored by Hudson Lacerda's
microabc, which implements Sagittal notation and now makes it
available for use with a temperament such as Peppermint 24, more
difficult to implement but now made practical and user-friendly by the
extraordinary efforts of this intrepid developer.

Here are a PDF score and MIDI files generated with microabc in
conjunction with abcm2ps and abc2midi for an example of a "shurist"
tuning set in Peppermint inspired by the shurist tuning and piece of
Shaahin Mohaajeri in just intonation, and the complete three-voice
rondeau "Black Laundry" (one PDF file and two MIDI files):

<http://www.bestII.com/~mschulter/BlackLaundry.pdf>
<http://www.bestII.com/~mschulter/pep_shurist_set.mid>
<http://www.bestII.com/~mschulter/BlackLaundry.mid>

For Shaahin's beautiful tuning based on a division of a string length
of 120, and a piece showing how it can be used, visit:

<http://240edo.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/shurist.mp3>

Soon I hope to release a zip archive which will document the files and
procedures used to generate these and other forms of output. The PDF
file used the PostScript Type 1 font Sagittal.pfb developed as part of
the microabc project from a sagittal True Type font of the Keenan/Secor
sagittal endeavor. This font makes possible high-quality output of the
kind abcm2ps users might expect with hinting to improve quality on
lower-resolution devices.

Of course, as Hudson often emphasizes, microabc is only one part of
the abc suite of utilities, which have also developed very impressive
features to make it easier, for example, to write multi-voice notation
which can either be posted in ASCII for Usenet or Internet forums in a
score-like format with vertical alignment of voices, or used to
generate typeset PostScript output or MIDI files.

A fun aspect of microabc is that in addition to producing MIDI files
from a Peppermint score file in the expected intonation, it's possible
to generate MIDI files based on a JI interpretation of the Sagittal
symbols. Actually this is a bit easier to implement that the
Peppermint mapping, although Hudson has insulated me as a user from
most of the complications, and a Linux shell script can make the
process user-transparent (mainly the need with a Peppermint reading to
process the score file twice with microabc to get an abc file for
abc2midi).

When read in a JI interpretation, the Peppermint symbols produce a
tuning with two 12-note Pythagorean chains at a 33:32 apart -- making
available some neat variations and shading effects that can give
another pleasant angle to a piece, rather like the many readings of
medieval or Renaissance pieces offered by different performers. Here
are versions of the Peppermint "shurist" set (where reducing the small
neutral second at around 14:13 to a Pythagorean 2187:2048, or from
about 129 to 114 cents, might not exactly fit the original scheme),
and of "Black Laundry" -- the latter of which has many idiomatic
regular Pythagorean intervals for this piece in a more or less
14th-century style, and also exuberant final cadence (using a near-9:7
third and pure 12:7 sixth in Peppermint) which becomes yet more
exuberant with intervals of around 445 cents (128:99) and 943 cents
(512:297), and neat 33:32 dieses (another take on Marchettus of
Padua?).

<http://www.bestII.com/~mschulter/pep_shurist_set2JI.mid>
<http://www.bestII.com/~mschulter/BlackLaundry2JI.mid>

In fact, the "Black Laundry" rendition in JI demonstrates the kind of
thing that Sagittal was especially designed to accomplish: making it
possible to "port" a piece from one tuning system to another with
variations in color (whether taken as a compromise or advantage), but
retaining the basic logic of the music as much as possible.

Thank you, Hudson, for an amazing development effort that gives new
meaning to the felicitous words that may be found on the Sagittal
website: "Keenan and Secor Honored."

Peace, love, and many thanks,

Margo