[Haskell-beginners] data constructors

[Michael Mossey]

Some additional thoughts:

Here is something I'm struggling with. Let's say a piece of music is several staves 
filled with chords. Staves have names. Each chord in a staff has a time.

In informal notation:

staff "fred":  (time 1.0, chord 1), (time 1.5, chord 2),  (time 2.0, chord 3)
staff "bob" :  (time 1.0, chord 4),                       (time 2.0, chord 5)

When laying out music, I need to find "verticals", which are chords located on 
different staves which happen to coincide in time. For instance, the above has three 
verticals:

   time 1.0:  ("fred", chord 1), ("bob", chord 4)
   time 1.5:  ("fred", chord 2)
   time 2.0:  ("fred", chord 3), ("bob", chord 5)

I want to write a function that converts the first way of organizing the information 
into the second. I tried writing types like

type Chord = ...
type Time = Double
type Name = String

type TimedChord = (Time,Chord)
type Staff = [(Time,Chord)]
type NamedStaff = (Name,Staff)
type NamedChord = (Name,Chord)
type Vertical = [NamedChord]
type TimedVertical = (Time,Vertical)

The function I want is

convert :: [NamedStaff] -> [TimedVertical]

As you can imagine, this is a confusing mess, with all these variants on named and 
timed things. I thought it might help to create functors called Named and Timed, 
which might help abstracting operations on named and timed things. For example,

datatype Named a = Named { namedName :: Name, namedData :: a }

instance Functor Named =
    name a :: Name
    name a = namedName a
    x `fmap` f = Named { namedName = namedName x, namedData = f $ namedData x }

Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Mike