Accidentals

Early in the experiment, we included most accidentals (the sharps and flats) represented as + (plus) and - (minus) respectively. This was taking more time and space than we wanted to afford, so we decided we would leave off the accidentals. This decision finessed over the notating of the next several rounds of poems to follow these rules:
• Accidentals can be left off in most cases for purposes of notation, with the understanding that they are available in the finalization of a suitable melody
• If a series of same vowels represent adjacent identical notes but the actual vowel sounds are not the same, we include the accidentals to distinguish the suggestion that the music reflect the phonetic difference.
• If a line ends with a vowel sound that takes an accidental, we include it.
• An R after the vowel sound generally brings the base note down a half-step.
• The short vowel sound takes the note generally up a half-step.
• O is proving a special case, as it has so many vowel tones, and the “short” sounds often feel closer to other short vowels than to seemingly adjacent sounds (au as in cot or caught and ow as in now seem close to the schwa sound, which is assigned to the first note in a particular mode, as it is (at least allegedly) the most common vowel sound in the English language. O and all the sounds originally assigned to its respective note is also problematic as it is a sixth above the base tone, which is not as common (or pleasing) an interval as a fourth or fifth.