Beaming
Beams work in a similar manner to ties. The L character
indicates the start of a beam, and the J character indicates
the end of a beam.
Try adding beams with irregular groupings in the first measure of the example.
Lazy beaming
VHV uses a lazy beaming system to beam notes together. Rather than
specifying the beginning/ending of each sub-beam or beamlet direction,
you instead indicate the beginning/ending of a beamed group of
notes with the L and J characters (i.e., encode only the primary
sub-beam):
Encoding a full description of sub-beams:
which is equivalent to this lazy-beam encoding of only the primary beam (the beam furthest from the noteheads):
autobeam filtering
The autobeam filter can be used to beam notes together automatically, based on the prevailing time signature:
Try copy-and-pasting the above content into VHV, and then press alt-c to compile the filter. This will run the Humdrum data through the filter and then display the results back in the text editor. Otherwise, the data is filtered before being converted into notation.