Articulations and Ornaments: better to separate them?

First of all, this post does not refer to the UI at all, but to the internal categorization of score elements; as far as the UI is concerned, articulation symbols and ornament symbols can be kept in the same palette (as now) or divided between several palettes, regardless of the internal structures and categories.

I believe there be some reasons which would suggest to qualify articulations and ornaments in some different way, at least internally, namely:

1) Ornaments may (actually should) apply to individual notes, not to chords. For instance, in this passage from the Pièces à une et deux violes (third book) by M. Marais:

there is a difference between the first chord of second measure -- where the tremblement is applied to one note only -- and the chord at the middle of the third measure, where two tremblements are applied one to each note.

On the other hand, there is probably no need for (real) articulations to apply to individual notes: chords are enough.

2) As far as playback is concerned, they have to be managed differently: articulations have to do with timing (either with time gate, for things like staccato, portato, ... or with tempo, like fermatas); while ornaments result in the note being split into several sound events.

The current implementation (see here ) tries to deal with both types at the same time, but the result is partial as, for instance, it depends from the order in which the different elements have been added.

If the above reasoning is correct and sensible, articulations and ornaments can be differentiated in several ways:

A) A new Element::Type::Ornament enum value can be added and the Articulation split; this may raise backward/forward compatibility issues.

B) A new member variable can be added to the Articulation class, to distinguish elements which are attached to chord and elements which are attached to notes.

C) A new member variable can be added to the Articulation class, holding a subtype of some kind (articulation, ornament, fingering( see below), ...), which appropriate code would then dispatch to the chord, to the note, position accordingly, render accordingly and so on.

In all cases, ornaments would presumably end up being stored in the note _el list.
_______________

A case apart are the four lute fingering symbols visible near the end of the Articulation palette. They were implemented as articulations, rather than as fingerings, as normal fingerings are textual elements, while these four symbols are, well..., symbols and, for them, all the Text machinery would only create problems.

They too should be applied to notes rather than to chords; see for instance, this excerpt from D. Gaultier, Pièces de luth..., Paris 1670, first chord, where the first finger fingering applies to two notes only out of four;

For this reason, they could possibly be treated the same (or similarly) as ornaments.

Any idea anyone?

Thanks,

M.