> I'm not familiar with Curwen sol-fa. It sounds interesting. I gather > from your description that it relies on computer typography. I suppose > I'm more interested at the moment in simple alphanumeric notations, > but I'd like to look into Curwen later.
It's a 19th century system, designed for movable lead type. I haven't seen any computer-set examples of it. It would be easy enough to do in TeX. The New Grove has a good article on it. What would be really useful would be to replicate what some songbooks do, putting the sol-fa for the tune above the staff so that singers could choose which notation they wanted. It turns out to be a real bugger to even get an ASCII approximation to that - you need a lot of punctuation signs in between notes, and ABC likes to align guitar chords or words against specific notes so you have nothing to anchor this stuff to. I tried to do the wild Nigerian hymn example from the New Grove "Notation" article and gave up. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
