Hi Kieren,
That for sure… but also, I think, the precise way one’s brain works best.
For example, I would say the exact same thing about absolute as you say about
\relative: it makes octave errors really easy [for me] to spot. I’m now so used
to using absolute, that the number of apostrophes and commas communicates
information to me directly: I see a’’ in the code, and my inner eye immediately
sees the precise key on my keyboard and the corresponding glyph on a staff,
whereas relative music always requires me to “do the math in-line” to figure
out where we are now. The note code
c c’ b e d’
doesn’t communicate position on the keyboard/staff to me as clearly as
c c' b e' d’'
Here I look at the initial c, and then the final d, and immediately know that
it is TWO octaves (and a note) away; with \relative, I need to trace my eye all
the way along the chain of notes (quite small in this example, but potentially
quite large in another gesture/context) and keep “carrying the 1s” along the
way, which I find to be inefficient and unnecessarily taxing.
That's interesting!
For me, LilyPond code is almost "write-only". The moment when I spot
octave errors is when I'm looking not at my .ly file, but at the
compiled .pdf file. (I compile all the time while editing; probably
that's not a very efficient use of CPU power...) For reading LilyPond
code, your reasoning makes perfect sense, of course.
Reuse and cut-and-paste really are the main inflection points when it comes to
the potential upside(s)/downside(s) of relative versus absolute note entry.
Another huge thing that makes it more feasible for the “average person” to
consider absolute note entry is Frescobaldi, with its MIDI entry and tools to
switch between relative and absolute; I’ll have to go back and see when I moved
to Frescobaldi full-time as my “IDE” (I used the built-in Mac “notepad” app for
the first few years!), but I’m guessing that happened almost exactly at the
same time as my move to absolute music.
I have zero experience with MIDI entry, but I can very well imagine that
using it changes the perspective also on relative vs. absolute quite a bit.
Lukas
