fing 0.1.0

🖐️ A universal representation of fingering systems for winds, reeds, and brass 🖐️

🖐️ fing: A universal representation of fingering systems for winds, reeds, and brass 🖐️

Abstract

fing is a universal representation of fingering systemss for monophonic keyed instruments, including but not limited to winds, reeds, and keyed brass.

Definitions

Monophonic (mono) instruments only play a single note or tone at a time, like wind and brass instruments.

A key is a button that can be pressed and held, or a hole that can be covered on an instrument.

A fingering is a set of keys being pressed at the same time.

A note-fingering is a note with a fingering that can play it. (Note and scale are used informally and generally here: see the tuney project for a full specification of tunings and scales.)

A fingering system is a set of note-fingerings. In one sytem, one note can correspond to many fingerings, and one fingering can correspond to multiple notes (a multi-note fingering or multi), like in brass instruments or overblown winds.

(The final choice of note from a multi might depend on almost anything: breath, embouchure, control information, randomness, or the state of the instrument itself. Mostly this can't be formally represented, but there will be a special case for the harmonic series, and a field for free-form text instructions to the performer, like "overblow very hard, medium-tight embouchure".)

Can we do better than just listing note fingerings?

Listing all the note-fingerings individually is the simplest way to go, and in many cases will be the best way: looking at, say, the fingering charts of the varieties of ocarina, there doesn't seem to be a clear organizing principle, and there are only a small number of fingerings in brass.

But most wind instruments fingerings have a linearity to them, taking advantage of the natural smoothness and speed of raising or lowering successive fingers in sequence.

Keys naturally divide into main keys (finger keys) and modifier keys (palm and octave keys).

Each main key has its own unique human finger that presses it. There seem to be 6 to 10 main keys in existing wind instruments.

Tricky edge cases

• Partly covered holes
• Brass instruments