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But the neumes' names don't abbreviate to single characters very well. (Let's see, a `p' must be a porrectus, no, a pressus, maybe a pes.) So I ended up using characters whose shapes reminded me of the neumes they were to represent. Hence `w' ended up as the key for a quilisma. (And thus, as you've no doubt already noted, I came up with a mnemonic scheme for remembering neumes.)
The keys for the simple neumes are as follows:
| Name | Neume | Key |
|---|---|---|
| Virga |
| l |
| Pes |
| / |
| Clivis |
| n |
| Porrectus |
| u |
| Torculus |
| a |
| Pressus |
| : |
| Pressus subpunctus |
| ; |
| Pressus liquescens |
| m |
| Quilisma |
| w |
| Punctum |
| . |
| Stropha |
| , |
| Oriscus |
| s |
| Epiphonus |
| d |
| Cephalicus |
| p |
I defined this font so that the neumes would join if you stuck two of them together. So, theoretically, that's all you have to do to create a compound neume. But in practice, I found that I had to modify some of the neumes to get forms that would combine smoothly. I used (mostly) capital letters for these compound variants:
The keys for the compound variants are as follows:
| Name | Neume | Key |
|---|---|---|
| Pes |
| - |
| Porrectus |
| U |
| Quilisma |
| W |
| Epiphonus |
| D |
| Cephalicus |
| P |
| Liquescens |
| J |
And so, the compound neumes from the previous page can be represented like this:
| Name | Neume | Key |
|---|---|---|
| Pes-porrectus | ![]() | -u |
| Pes-pressus subpunctis | ![]() | -; |
| Porrectus-clivis | ![]() | Un |
| Quilisma-cephalicus | ![]() | WP |
| Quilisma-porrectus | ![]() | Wu |
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