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Ambitus

The term ambitus (plural: ambituses) denotes a range of pitches for a given voice in a part of music. It also may denote the pitch range that a musical instrument is capable of playing. Most musical instruments have their ambitus standardized (or at least there is agreement upon the minimal ambitus of a particular type of instrument), such that a composer or arranger of a piece of music can easily meet the ambitus constraints of the targeted instrument. However, the ambitus of the human voice depends on individual physiological state, including education and training of the voice. Therefore, a singer potentially has to check for each piece of music if the ambitus of that piece meets his individual capabilities. This is why the ambitus of a piece may be of particular value to vocal performers.

The ambitus is typically notated on a per-voice basis at the very beginning of a piece, e.g. nearby the initial clef or time signature of each staff. The range is graphically specified by two noteheads, that represent the minimum and maximum pitch. Some publishers use a textual notation: they put the range in words in front of the corresponding staff. LilyPond only supports the graphical ambitus notation.

To apply, add the Ambitus_engraver to the Voice context, i.e.

       \paper {
         \translator {
           \VoiceContext
           \consists Ambitus_engraver
         }
       }
     

This results in the following output:

[picture of music]

If you have multiple voices in a single staff, and you want a single ambitus per staff rather than per each voice, then add the Ambitus_engraver to the Staff context rather than to the Voice context.

It is possible to tune individual ambituses for multiple voices on a single staff, for example by erasing or shifting them horizontally. An example is in input/test/ambitus-mixed.ly

See also

Ambitus, input/regression/ambitus.ly, input/test/ambitus-mixed.ly.

Bugs

There is no collision handling in the case of multiple per-voice ambitus.


This page is for LilyPond-2.0.1 (stable-branch).

Report errors to <bug-lilypond@gnu.org>.