Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Music

Use of feet in music for pitch, organ stops, wind instrument air column length
Hi, I've started a discussion over on WP:UNITS about the Use of feet in music for pitch, organ stops, wind instrument air column length, if anyone has opinions and would like to discuss. Cheers — Jon (talk) 20:48, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Righto, now that's sorted, perhaps we should discuss the use of eight-foot pitch notation (e.g. 16′ pedal stop) for organ stops and wind instruments? — Jon (talk) 04:09, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
 * That's worth discussing in the context of organs, but is not much used otherwise. Dicklyon (talk) 03:52, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Pitch
Considering the recent topic above (eight-foot pitch notation for organ stops), there is no discussion here in the MOS about pitch, which is pretty fundamental. Consensus in the literature seems to be orbiting around scientific pitch notation, which follows the note letter with a number for the octave, usually as a subscript (e.g. middle C = C₄) but sometimes a regular number (C4) or superscript (C⁴) is used. I'm not proposing we settle on which of those to use, as long as one of them is used, just recommending it over the many (and there are many!) older systems due to its simplicity and increasingly common use. Additionally, I think we should at least mention in passing, or make an allowance for, the use of eight-foot pitch notation where appropriate too, which would be when discussing organ stops, or technical organology topics like wind instrument air columns, lengths of keyboard strings, etc. This notation is standard for describing organ stops (e.g. 2′ flute stop) and an exception has been made on MOS:FOOT to allow for this usage. — Jon (talk) 04:22, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I think scientific pitch notation is most commonly written in the subscript form ( or   -> C$4$). I would suggest not to use the Unicode character . -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:31, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree, I just bashed out a ₄ quickly for illustrative purposes. — Jon (talk) 08:25, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

THEBAND disambiguators
Re MOS:THEBAND, it doesn't really say much about disambiguators, e.g. "(Beatles song)" vs "(the Beatles song)" vs "(The Beatles song)". We decided some years ago to use "(Beatles song)", as in All Together Now (Beatles song), yet had a lot of pushback (all my changes were undone) 5 years ago when trying to do similarly for things like Mama Said (The Shirelles song) or I Luv U (The Ordinary Boys song) or Meanwhile (The Moody Blues song). Is there any appetite for trying to be more consistent about such things? Dicklyon (talk) 00:31, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * There was a discussion on this very issue recently at WP:ALBUMS. It resulted in, surprise surprise, no consensus.
 * (My opinion? We should omit "the" here.) Popcornfud (talk) 10:15, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Maybe a well-advertised RFC, with an actual close, would have a chance of reaching a consensus. We should explicitly propose wording to add to the MOS, perhaps a couple of options, since people are finding different interpretations in the current wording.  As you can see, my opinion agrees with yours; I'm sorry I missed that discussion.  Dicklyon (talk) 15:52, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * If you want to make such a discussion, you have my vote! Popcornfud (talk) 16:02, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Dicklyon I sure dislike those long discussions that end without consensus and Wikipedia continuing to be inconsistent. Go for it! And don't let my implied pessimism hold you back. SchreiberBike &#124; ⌨  21:52, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Title Stylizations
It seems to have become standard on Wikipedia to trade semantic and historical accuracy of song and album titles for hard-line notions of "grammatical correctness". I just want it to be know that this is biasing Wikipedia against meaning conveyed through stylizations and that it makes it less accurate and less useful for scholarship and historical study. It is also completely inconsistent with how consumers might see and find works. For example, many poems and songs use all lowercase with some uppercase letters to spell out words. By removing stylizations, you are deliberately erasing conveyed meaning from the title. This goes for every single artistic work, including poetry and music. A few others on Wikipedia, like @Livelikemusic seem to call the use of stylizations "fan-driven"; this reasoning is biased and to me would go against Wikipedia's neutrality. If you want to be for or against stylizations, you have to have logical reasons for doing so. Anything else would not be neutral at all. In my opinion, there are no logical reasons for going against stylizations, but there are plenty of logical reasons to take them into account, some of which I've already discussed above. Krixano (talk) 04:46, 20 April 2024 (UTC)


 * This is a formal notice that I will be bowing out of this discussion, because I take internet cults very seriously, and after spending several hours reading a lot of user interaction here on Wikipedia, I have decided in my best judgement that this is an unsafe environment that I would consider to be an internet cult. I apologize to anyone expecting me to continue the discussion, but I cannot do that. You can view my User page, if it remains up, for additional reasons to this decision. Krixano (talk) 12:08, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Personnel listing on albums
Assuming this is the right place to mention this. I'm sort of curious since I've seen it on some articles but not on others; why do Personnel lists on some albums use  to separate personnel instead of  ? I went to check this page to see if it was a MOS thing, but it appears to not be, so I'm stumped. Neo Purgatorio (talk) 18:12, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
 * If it's about presentation, it's a MOS thing. Very basically pseudo headings are used when editors decide they should be (we have discretion about almost everything). They don't appear in the Table of Contents and offer no natural target for browsers, but give readers a heading-like indicator. If there has ever been a discussion about this specific concern, it may have resulted in a forgotten decision or none. If there's nothing written in stone about what should be done with personnelle, but there's a clear common style in current use, defer to that (it's natural consensus), and if it's mostly one way, with a relatively few outliers, it could be worth drafting guidelines based on the common style.  20:30, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Seconding everything Fred said. Worth clarifying the usefulness of pseudoheaders in keeping from flooding the TOC. As an example, I recently created Everyone's Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, where all the personnel are separately listed track-by-track. If I had used  instead, there would be 16 additional headers and the TOC would be longer than the infobox. In cases like this, I find preservation of space to be preferable. There is also the option of TOC limit, but I wouldn't use it in that article because it could interfere with other level 3 headings that I/other editors may want to apply later as they become relevant. As for a guideline, I think MOS:PSEUDOHEAD does a good job of getting this across already. QuietHere (talk &#124; contributions) 04:57, 19 May 2024 (UTC)