Riemann: an OpenType font for functional analysis

[OCTO]

The system I use and teach is the old central-east European style of mediants.

Basically, there is Tonic, its two Dominants on the perfect fifths (SubDominant: SD, and SuperDominant: D)
and for each of them there are Mediants on thirds (SubMediants: SM; and SuperMediants: M). We never use "super", it is just dominant and mediant.
Mediants can be diatonic, or chromatic.
Example:
A submediant to subdominant (in C major) is chord d-minor.
A low (=chromatically lowered) submediant to the SubDominant is the Phrygian chord (F) that is Dflat-major, when inverted it is Napolitan (N, usually thus N6).
P is the polar chord, the only one with no function (or semi-T+semi-S function): F# in C-major, thus, if p it is minor if P it is major:

Screen Shot 2018-08-11 at 18.03.31.png (340.97 KiB) Viewed 41212 times

The example has some minor mistakes in analysis, ignore.

[OCTO]

More here (© to me):

Screen Shot 2018-08-11 at 18.10.22.png (419.91 KiB) Viewed 41210 times

[MalteM]

This is only a proof of concept but I think if some of your are interested one could make this

• more feature-complete (f. e. add top notes above the symbol, complete set of altered figures, triple dominant, accidental glyphs, ligatures for numbers ≥ 10 that take only one horizontal space, …)
• more robust and easy to use (f. e. another input order of several lines of figures)
• more beautiful (better horizontal spacing, better glyphs f. e. for double subdominant or slashed subdominant)
• and maybe base it on a different font (I’d like Helvetica or a clone).

I finished my thesis using the published version of the font (plus two or three hacky additions) in September. In the past few days I managed to change the input order by using the mark and mkmk OpenType features. Because I have no idea of font licensing things and I’m not 100% satisfied with Source Sans Pro as a base I made a new font from scratch and drew some provisional glyphs (as you can guess I didn’t spend much time on nice forms as this was meant to be a proof of concept for the mark/mkmk approach):

Bildschirmfoto zu 2019-08-15 01-09-27.png (82.25 KiB) Viewed 40285 times

All of this is input as ASCII characters, f. e. the accidentals are ligatures

Code: Select all

#< #= #> #<< #>>

while the ASCII # is displayed as “Accidental” But the really nice thing is the simpler input order for the last double dominant:

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DD^4-3^^6-5

In my first attempt that would have been

Code: Select all

DD-46-~~-35

The number of ^’s selects the layer for the following glyphs. The only drawback I currently see in that mark/mkmk approach is that those superscript glyphs take no horizontal space (else several layers of unknown length could not be placed above each other so easily) so in some programs you have to add that space before continuing the text. In fact for the screenshot above made with LibreOffice I entered

Code: Select all

DD^4-3^^6-5...

before writing “ More text.”, the periods are converted to empty glyphs by a contextual substitution.

For now I use ^_- for superscripts/subscripts/horizontal lines. Dear Dorico/Sibelius/Finale users, which alternatives would you suggest for _ and -?

Is there someone who is interested in making a nice font from that and can help me with licensing, metadata and maybe glyph drawing?

Edit: Another idea for the list above:

• Maybe one could make a Fontforge script that produces such a font from an arbitrary “base” font. Of course this would only work if one could make missing superscript glyphs like < with such a script. That script would take information about glyph widths etc. from a (probably hand-made) file, make a “bare” font containing (only) all the needed glyphs and then apply the features.

I don’t think it’s worth the effort.

[PatrickL]

Hi Malte and others! This is very interesting, I am about to start writing my thesis and would really need to be able to do functional analysis like this. Are there any instruction or pointers on how to go about for us that are not used to compiling fonts? I use Dorico but if not possible to use right in the scoring program, I could do with creating analysis somewhere else and paste it as graphics.

Regards,
Patrick

[John Ruggero]

Concerning the Dvorak Symphony no. 9 passage shown above. I have never gotten much useful information from a chord-by-chord analysis of this kind because the melodies are missing. So I would address the passage like this:

Example Dvorak.jpeg (84.98 KiB) Viewed 37563 times

A plagal progression I-IV-I accompanying the melody D-flat E-flat-F. The intervening harmonies produced by the counterpoint of the the soprano and bass lines, which include various kinds of neighboring and passing tones. It is this counterpoint that I find meaningful because it shows how the passage is held together as a unit and how each harmony is produced in a dynamic way from underlying melodic motion. The descending thirds in the bass line in ms. 2-3 are particularly beautiful and not addressed in a chord by chord analysis.

[OCTO]

Hi Malte and others! This is very interesting, I am about to start writing my thesis and would really need to be able to do functional analysis like this. Are there any instruction or pointers on how to go about for us that are not used to compiling fonts? I use Dorico but if not possible to use right in the scoring program, I could do with creating analysis somewhere else and paste it as graphics.

Regards,
Patrick

It would be best if you could take a photo of "the most complex" analysis you wish to make, so that we know what is your working frame.
There are many options depends what your goal is. If you write a thesis, the presentation should be a top quality, I guess.

Concerning the Dvorak Symphony no. 9 passage shown above. I have never gotten much useful information from a chord-by-chord analysis of this kind because the melodies are missing. So I would address the passage like this:

What is Nb - if I may ask?
Actually, melodies are not missing. It is the full orchestral texture in a piano reduction.

[John Ruggero]

Nb means a neighboring tone. P means a passing tone.

I meant that the soprano and bass melodies shown in the piano reduction are not addressed in the chord-by chord analysis as melodies, they are just labeled as parts of chords. That is, the vertical element has become too dominant at the expense of the horizontal, melodic aspect.

I just modified the analysis to make this clearer. The two voices on each line are the soprano and bass voices counterpointed against each other. The top line shows the basic underlying structure of the Dvorak excerpt. The second line is an elaboration of the basic underlying structure that provides the foundation for the interesting surface harmonies and shows why the music sounds coherent and logical.

[trochi]

Hey there!

I tried to build and then install the Riemann font, however neither musescore nor Libre Office did the Open Type Magic for me :/
Where did I most likely go wrong?

Jan

[frauber]

Can someone please share a .otf file? I'm not sure how to build this on Windows.

[OCTO]

I would like to say something about the font here. You can find the font at this repository on GitHub.

I have tried to download the sfd file, but my FontForge can't open it. Any issue?
Also, does anyone have already compiled the otf version?