I have done the essential typographical work of combining readable versions of Ben Johnston’s symbols with the standard accidentals, including ligatures. I stopped at the 13-limit because the “symbols” beyond the 11th harmonic are simply numerals. Also, in my experience* the 13-limit is as far as humans can discern correct intonation of just intervals by ear.
I myself have no interest in extending SMuFL beyond the 13-limit for Ben’s notation system. The 13s serve as an example of size and style for higher numerals, which I would use very rarely if ever. Of course others will want to do so; why stop at 31? Toby Twining in one piece wrote a harmonic stack up to the 65th harmonic, requiring prime numerals as high as 61. It’s easy to combine symbols by any of various methods in these cases. And with a regular text font the numerals are at the expected codepoints and can be entered from the keyboard.
One limitation of a regular text font is the problem of getting numerals upside-down. But this is not the only typographical problem with Ben’s system that is not entirely solved by Bravura: there is still a thorny matter of vertical placement of +, –, 13, relative to notes on lines vs. notes in spaces. In my discussions with Daniel about this system, we decided to draw the line where we did because a) the possibility of enormous proliferation of ligature combinations that might never actually be used by anybody, and, especially, b) some of these typographical problems are better handled by music software, rather than in the font itself.
In my opinion, practical notation for higher ratios (and, especially, tempered and approximate and other non-just intervals) is much better served by the Sagittal system.
MJ
* (copying, performing and recording music of a protégé of Ben’s for many years, and copying some of Ben’s own music, in which he never employed numerals beyond 13)
Knut Nergaard wrote:
> looking through Adrian Pertout’s Microtonal notation font, it seems to me that the range of Johnston accidentals in SMuFL is not complete. Do you plan to complete the range in a future version.
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