Question marks in Winterreise

[fabianmoss]

The annotator has used several forms of question marks:

• a single ? after a chord symbol
• double ?? after a chord symbol
• only ? as a chord symbol

This has to be corrected (i.e. removed).

While the chord symbols in the current state of the regular expression are not syntactically correct, it might be worthwile to think to include this into the annotation system. We could, for instance, define levels of uncertainty, such as:

• chord symbol followed by nothing: "I am absolutely sure about this analysis."
• chord symbol followed by ?: "I could imagine someone else might choose a different analysis"
• chord symbol followed by ??: "This is the best I could do but I am really unsure"

What do you think?

[johentsch]

It is worthwile to think about the suggestion. I would argue against uncertainty notation because it could encourage annotators to just draw the "uncertain card" instead of pondering the harmony until a convincing solution has been found. The I6-I notation for ambiguity is a good solution IMHO. At the moment, writing a question mark requires a corrector's action, whether the solution is good or bad. Instead, I have asked the corrector to always take a decision ( and be it for ambiguous notation) and when in doubt to ask us. On the long run, it would be nice to be able to open discussion threads for ambiguous harmonies!