A musical question for math-types.

Originally posted by iamatiger
What about slurs? On most instruments two notes slurred together are different from two notes played separately, and you can slur across bars (meaning that different notes as well as similar notes can be joined together both within and across bars). You can't slur rests though.

i think the problem would get too difficult if we start to count all different types of playing a melody, 'cause when we make a differnece between slurred and not slurred, we might also want to make a difference between forte (loud) and piano (soft) and between allegro (fast) and andante (slower), not to speak about crescendo, diminuendo, legato, pizzicato and all others of this kind...

Originally posted by Nuathala
i think the problem would get too difficult if we start to count all different types of playing a melody, 'cause when we make a differnece between slurred and not slurred, we might also want to make a difference between forte (loud) and piano (soft) and between allegro (fast) and andante (slower), not to speak about crescendo, diminuendo, legato, pizzicato and all others of this kind...

If you can choose to slur all notes then you have between every two notes the possibility to slur, or not to slur. So it would give a factor 2 for every note. so the factor is about 2^32.

If you include forte and piano you should look at them as different notes. A note in piano is then different as the same note not in piano. The only change in the calculations would be the '13'.

All the other terms I've never heard about, but it probably can be done the same way.