Half diminished chord confusion, possible bug?
I am now confused.
When I use a chord like Cø, MS shows only three notes: C E♭ and G♭. But what happened to the B♭? I thought that's why they call it half-diminished.
This is what I thought I knew:
Diminished (Co) :1 ♭3 ♭5
Diminished 7th: (Co7): 1 ♭3 ♭5 ♭♭7 (doubly flat 7th)
Half-diminished: (Cø): 1 ♭3 ♭5 ♭7 (seventh is a dominant 7th)
Thus, there is NO need to write Cø7, becasue the flat 7th is already implied by Cø. It's redundant.
Right?
However, upon inspecting a half-diminished chord, via right clicking on a chord and selecting "Realize Chord Symbols", it doesn't show the dominant 7th note. But if I type a chord with Cø7, it uses the expected notes.
Is this a bug? Why should I have to say Cø7 when Cø is equivalent?
Comments
Standard practice is to include the 7, but indeed, some people do omit it since it can be deduced. I don't recommend this practice, though. Actually, I don't recommend the half-diminished symbol at all - too easily confused with diminished. Minor seven flat five is less problematic in practice, especially sight-reading charts in simply lit bars:-).
Anyhow, in theory we could enhance the playback to considered the half-diminished symbol by itself to imply the seventh just as human musicians would. See #311353: ø (Half-diminished) symbol wrongly interpreted as o (diminished)
In reply to Standard practice is to… by Marc Sabatella
But, MS currently renders Cø as 1 b3 b5, which is wrong. Without the flat7 you just have a plain dim chord. And with that, MS is saying Cø = Co, which is not the case. So maybe MS should recognize both Cø AND Cø7 as the same thing. That differentiates the half-d from Co and Co7.
Also, 'Cø' vs 'Cm7b5' is two characters vs five. Less characters is easier on the brain if you have complex jazz chords on every quarter note.
And even though I don't confuse 'ø' for 'o', I wouldn't mind seeing a move away 'ø' in favor of some other character that looks more contrasty to 'o'.
Maybe get a new set of symbols and make a proposal to the Unicode Consortium, single characters if possible, that are very clear. We have some already:
Δ = maj7
4 is sometimes = sus4
2 is sometimes = sus2
I've wondered if these could be simplified too: b5, #5, b9, #9, #11, b13
Here's a great unicode website for characters: http://www.amp-what.com/ Type in a word like 'music' or 'triangle' or 'circle'.
In reply to Then a different character… by DrumDog79
Right, as I said, we currently expect the chord symbol to be written in the standard way, which includes the 7, and we don't include special case handling in the playback for cases where someone omits the 7. It's something that could be added someday, but for now, better both for MuseScore and for human musicians to include the 7 to avoid confusion and sight-reading errors.
It's true Cmi7b5 is more characters, but it's also less likely to be confused for another chord symbol, and to the extent a mistake is likely to be made, someone might not flat the five, which is a better mistake to make than to play a fully diminished seventh chord. That's why the most influential standard on this topic (Brandt/Roemer) specifically recommends against the half-diminished symbol and why virtually all major jazz publishers adhere to that recommendation. You are certainly free to use the half-diminished symbol in your own self-published music, and MuseScore supports it, but for now at least, the playback requires you be specific about the 7 as also found in pretty much any theory text that uses this symbol.
The characters are all found in Unicode and/or the SMuFL standard for music, so that's not an issue.