<-- previous page Table of Contents Index next page -->
Chant typically uses an irregular number of beats per measure, or often no measures at all in the normal sense. Mup checks to make sure you provide enough notes to fill the time signature, but will allow you to use less, filling the remainder with space. So one possible approach to writing chant is to specify a large time signature--at least as big as you will ever have on any given line of music--and then supplying as many notes as you need, letting Mup pad with space as needed. If the warnings are annoying, you can set the warn parameter to turn the warnings off.
Here is an example that shows some other techniques you might use when
writing chant.
1: 1a;
lyrics 1: "This<^ is an example of one way>";
bar
1: d;e;2f;
lyrics 1: "to do chant.";
bar
1: 1f;
lyrics 1: "when<^ there are many words for a>";
bar
1: d;f;2;
lyrics 1: "sin-gle note.";
dblbar
newscore
// Note use of 'n' to not print the time signature
score time=7/4n
music
1: a;;;b;g;2a;
lyrics 1: "When there are man-y notes,";
bar
score time=8/4n
music
1: d;e;f;e;f;8e;;2;
lyrics 1: "You might change the time sig-na-ture";
bar
score time=5/4n
music
1: a;e;;2d;
lyrics 1: "on ev-ery bar,";
bar
score time=7/4n
music
1: e;f;e;d;c;2d;
lyrics 1: "to match the syl-la-bles.";
dblbar
newscore
score time=8/4n
music
// Note use of 'n' to not print tuplet number/bracket
1: {d;e;f;g;e;2d;;}10n,1/2;
lyrics 1: "You can al-so use tup-lets,";
invisbar
1: {f;g;e;2d;e;2.d;}9n,1/2;
lyrics 1: "A-long with in-vis-bars.";
dblbar
newscore
score stemlen=0
music
1: d+;c+;b;g;2a;;
lyrics 1: "Set stem-len to ze-ro,";
invisbar
1: {f;2e;4d;c;1d;}9n,1/2;
lyrics 1: "to get stem-less notes.";
endbar
