Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draft for V:)

2001-01-06 Thread Richard Robinson

On Sat, 6 Jan 2001, John Chambers wrote:
 Richard Robinson [w]rites:
 | On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Wendy Galovich wrote:
 | 
 |Really?? What do the Dead Sea Scrolls sound like in abc?? :-)
 |  (Sorry John, I couldn't resist!)
 |
 | Quite right too - it's the best bit of bait I've seen in ages :) Have they
 | really ? All of them ? And are they available to anybody that might want
 | to transcribe them ?
 |
 | I don't want to do that myself, you understand; just curious, because it
 | was such a very long time that they weren't available.
 
 Didn't you hear about it?  Well, I suppose to most people  (and  most
 news  people),  it's  importance  was  somewhat  less than the latest
 football scores. But it did get reported here and there, including on
 NPR here in the States.
 
 A few years back, in the early 90's, some people got access  to  some
 photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls, made copies, and put them on the Net.
 The Scrolls' "owners" were duly outraged. They had a nice thing going
 for 40 years, acting as religious gatekeepers to the Scrolls, able to
 exclude people who  didn't  have  the  Right  Attitude,  and  so  on.

I remember bumping into one or two of those photos, back in the early days
of the web (nostalgia. Trumpet Winsock !), but as you say, they seemed
very much an exception. I wondered if the rest of them were now equally
available.

So many search engines, so little time ...

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem


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Re: [abcusers] Finding music files

2001-01-06 Thread Frank Nordberg



John Chambers wrote:
 
 So how does one go about identifying  which  of  the  graphics  files
 and/or PDF/PS files contain music?
[snip]
 
 How did you discover those 7560 images of music?  How  would  one  go
 about  sifting  through  the  billions  of  images  on  the  Net  and
 identifying the ones that are images of music?

I was hoping somebody could help me with that some day. For now I do it
manually :(

Actually it's not that bad. By now I have a pretty good idea of where to
look. I think I've indexed between 5 and 10 percents of the tunes out
there and the update interval is a couple of months or so, and it's
getting better all the time. Coincidentally, that is more or less the
same as most general www search engines can claim.


Frank NOrdberg
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Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draft for V:)

2001-01-06 Thread Frank Nordberg



John Chambers wrote:
 |
 |   Really?? What do the Dead Sea Scrolls sound like in abc?? :-)
 | (Sorry John, I couldn't resist!)
 
 Hmm ...  Maybe we could find the transcriptions on the Web, stick  an
 ABC header on a few passages, and see what they sound like.  It makes
 as much sense as some of the numerology and hidden text  things  that
 people dig out of the bible ...

Maybe that's the truth about the Scrolls. They weren't religious
writings at all, but rather the notebook of some session player way back then...

 
 Actaully, I've seen the results of taking English text  and  treating
 it  as  ABC.

Actually I think it is a program out there that does that.


Frank Nordberg
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Re: [abcusers] WWW music notation formats (was: Why XML is a bad idea...)

2001-01-06 Thread Laura Conrad

 "Frank" == Frank Nordberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 I think Wil was talking about formats in which music *information* is
 available, not formats which graphically display information.  All the
 stuff in GIF or PDF on Musica Viva comes from music information which
 has been entered in some other format, such as ABC or finale.

Frank That's true of course, but I hardly think the end user
Frank would consider that important.

Given you don't give the source except for the ABC, it's not.

But if you want to transpose or re-edit the music, it's critically
important.  And I have a lot of "end users" who want to do that with
mine.

-- 
Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (801) 365-6574 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
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Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draftfor V:)

2001-01-06 Thread Frank Nordberg



John Henckel wrote:
 
 At 04:39 PM 1/5/2001 +0100, Frank wrote:
 I've started building a multiformat sheet music search engine, indexing
 music in GIF, JPEG, PS, PDF and ABC formats (the only truly
 cross-platform compatible formats for notated music).
 
 What??  You forgot the most important one!  MIDI files are cross-platform
 and they are "notated" in the sense that they have "notes" in them.

That's right, you could probably add guitar tabs as well. Actually my
search engine also includes midi files, but not on their own - only when
they are connected to files in some of the other formats.

The reason is simple: The Free Sheet Music Search Engine is for standard
notation sheet music only, that is either graphical images (GIFs,
PDFs...) of notated music or files directly and reliably convertable to
standard notation (ABC). Despite what some hotheads might claim, you
can't count on being able to convert a midi file to notated music.
Sometimes it works, but usually it doesn't. That's not *only* due to the
limitation of current translating programs, but also limitations in the
midi standard itself and the way it's used.

Besides, there are already so many good midi search engines out there,
so why bother making another one?

Frank Nordberg
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Re: [abcusers] draft for V:

2001-01-06 Thread Laura Conrad

 "James" == James Allwright [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

James On the topic of voice numbers needing to be contiguous
James (Laura's post); this restriction did exist in early
James versions of abc2midi, but the current version should allow
James non-contiguous voice numbers.

No, this doesn't seem to be true.  The attached file plays only one
voice, with an abcMIDI that I downloaded and compiled this morning.



X:1
T:IX. Go crystall teares,
C: John Dowland
O: From The First Booke of songs or Ayres of foure parts, with Tableture for the Lute
L:1/4
M:C
%%MIDI nobarlines
K:G dorian
V:1 name="Cantus"
L:1/4
K:G dorian
G4 G2 _A2 | G4 z2 G2 | GA B2 c3 d | =B4
w:Go cry- stall tears, like to _ the mor- ning showrs,
z2 G2 | c2 c2  |"(1)"_e6 d2 c2 =B2 | c3 c d8 | z B G A B2 c2 | B2 G2 
w:And sweet- ly weep in- to thy La- dies breast.  And as the dewes re- vive the
_A3 A | G4 z2 G2 | G A B c d2 B2 | _e2 c2 c4  z2 z |: _e d B d2 | c2 B2
w:droop- ing flowers, so let your drops of pi- tie be ad- drest, to quick- en up the 
thoghts
G B _A2 | G4 z2 G2 | G3 A =B2 c2 | d2 _e2 d3 d |1 c4 :|2 c4 |]
w:of my de- sert, which sleeps too sound, whilst I from her de- part.
V:3 name="Tenor"
L:1/4
K:G minor treble-8
%%MIDI nob
%%MIDI transpose -12
c8 c3 =B/ A/ =B3 A/ B/ c2 B2 _A3 A G4 c4 G2 _A2 _A G
w:Go cry- stall _  tears, like _ to the mor- ning showrs, And sweet- ly weep in - 
G3 C c4 =B A =B4 _B4 z e c d e B2 e c _A2 F B4 c2 B3 A
w: to thy La- dies _ breast.  And as _ the dewes re- vive the droop- ing flowers, so 
let your
G A B c d d c8 c  d e  f |: g3 B c d e3 B c _A B G G
w: drops of pi- tie be ad- drest, to quick- en _ up the thoghts, the thoghts  of my 
de- sert, which sleeps
   A   =B2c2 G2 _e2 d2   g2   gG2  A   |1 _A  A G c  d e  f  :|2 =B   
c2  =B  c |]
w: too sound, whilst I from her  from her, de- part, from her de- part  to quick- en. 
from her de- part.





-- 
Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (801) 365-6574 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139



Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draft for V:)

2001-01-06 Thread Frank Nordberg



John Chambers wrote:
 
 Still, I'd estimate that there are maybe 20K truly distinct ABC tunes
 on the web that my search program has found, on about 125 machines.

Here are the 123 ABC sites I've listed at The Free Sheet Music Directory.
It's probably not absolutely identical to John's list (although we do
exchange URLs)

In case of e mail accidents: All lines in the list should start with
http:// (of course ;)

Frank Nordberg



http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/
http://www.taberna.com.ar/
http://adactio.com/session/
http://home.t-online.de/home/pheld/noten.htm
http://diato.org/tablat.htm
http://shiva.di.uminho.pt/~jj/
http://www.celticmusic.com/
http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/
http://faeryland.tamu-commerce.edu/joyce/
http://famdeboer.www.cistron.nl/bagpipe.html
http://Fox.nstn.ca:80/~mgasikn/violin.html
http://hjem.get2net.dk/widell/
http://home.clara.net/gmatkin/tunes.htm
http://home.primus.com.au/timbarker/
http://home1.swipnet.se/~w-11382/abc.htm
http://ifdo.pugmarks.com/~seymour/runabc/top.html
http://kazimodal.trad.org/
http://members.aol.com/boynehunt/ceili.html
http://members.aol.com/jmarchenry
http://members.aol.com/somido/abcsongs.html
http://members.teleweb.at/simon.wascher/
http://members.tripod.com/~Rosin_the_bow/tunes.html
http://moinejf.free.fr/
http://people.we.mediaone.net/brunodale/dances.html
http://perso.club-internet.fr/banwarth/engguitare.htm
http://perso.club-internet.fr/ocoronel/
http://perun.hscs.wmin.ac.uk/~jra/
http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/german/homes/agng/
http://pw2.netcom.com/~crfowler/pcorner.htm
http://rbu01.ed-rbu.mrc.ac.uk/barflystuff/barflypage.html
http://tnt.vianet.on.ca/pages/rickere/index.shtml
http://users.erols.com/olsonw/
http://w3.one.net/~rsim/
http://web.syr.edu/~htkeays/morris/hounds/
http://www.8ung.at/diatonica/abc_eng.html
http://www.AccordionLinks.com/publisher.cfm
http://www.akula.com/~blakeley/music/index.html
http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/gatherer/index.html
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxhf/music/music.html
http://www.blueskiesink.com/bar-b-q/index.htm
http://www.blueskiesink.com/Ormston/default.htm
http://www.blueskiesink.com/reavy/
http://www.calweb.com/~ndlxs/dulcimer.html
http://www.celticmusic.co.nz/greenman/mark/
http://www.celticmusic.com/roger_landes/dragon_reels.shtml
http://www.cnnw.net/~oneil/
http://www.continuo.freeserve.co.uk/
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/dance/playford.html
http://www.cranfordpub.com/
http://www.cranfordpub.com/tunes/abcs
http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/~keryell/trad/partitions/partitions.html
http://www.dinglehall.freeserve.co.uk/kyoy/
http://www.downie65.freeserve.co.uk/
http://www.execpc.com/~jimvint/abc/milwsun1.abc
http://www.execpc.com/~jimvint/index.html
http://www.fff.at/fff/dance/
http://www.g8ina.enta.net/index.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6464/hmpg.html
http://www.geocities.com/bertvv/en/index.html
http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/4766/index.html
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5567/playford.txt
http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/7088/
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9618/
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9618/winder.html
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/6812/
http://www.geocities.com/~cliff_moses/
http://www.hslc.org/~gormley
http://www.ihp-ffo.de/~msm/
http://www.ihp-ffo.de/~msm/
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/RRTuneBk/tunebook.html
http://www.lesession.demon.co.uk
http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/esl/bley-vroman/contra/
http://www.manchester-morris.freeserve.co.uk/
http://www.banjolin.supanet.com/
http://www.mandolin.u-net.com/abctunes.htm
http://www.mcn.net/~acflynn/music.html
http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~chapman/
http://www.musicaviva.com
http://www.nyckelharpa.org/
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/jack.html
http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~tradsoc/
http://www.salford.ac.uk/media/research/vmpaims.htm
http://www.skandia-folkdance.org/spelmanslag/index.html
http://www.sofiamusicschool.nl/ethno2.htm
http://www.soltec.net/~daglenn/conc_70.html
http://www.spirit.net.au/~gramac/
http://www.stanford.edu/~gwaldon/
http://www.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~lingnau/
http://www.tradfrance.com
http://www.trytel.com/~cfalt/Fiddle/
http://www.tullochgorm.com/~tarider/
http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/abcmusic/music.html
http://www.ulst.ac.uk/faculty/artdes/Global/Fiddle/Tunes/index.html
http://www.8ung.at/tradivarium/
http://www.webcom.com/~liam/gaelsong/song.html
http://www.laymusic.org/
http://www.yagelski.com/sbox/index.html
http://www1.roke.co.uk/SIB/repertoire.html
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~larryc/
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a7425519/
http://www.multimania.com/corneymusers/
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~ibb/scd/Music/
http://abc.sourceforge.net/
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/people/ohgaki/sainak/sainak.html
http://www.mbay.net/~brendah/articles/PDA.Jul.96/
http://www.uni-jena.de/~osb/tradswed/
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~dexy/celtic.htm
http://members.xoom.com/Leffidd/
http://www.formulus.com/hymns/abc2gif.html
http://www.flatpicker.com
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~cobb/

Re: [abcusers] Finding music files

2001-01-06 Thread Antti Kaihola

On Sat, 06 Jan 2001, John Chambers wrote:

 So how does one go about identifying  which  of  the  graphics  files
 and/or PDF/PS files contain music?

 It seems to me that discovering that these contain music is far  from
 trivial.   For the gif and png files, it's probably not possible with
 the current state of AI.

I've tried some OMR (optical music recognition) programs, and although
their performance is still poor compared to OCR, I've been quite
impressed of what they can do.

Imagine we have an OMR package. It can recognize without help from the
user say 25 % of all musical symbols on an image of a music sheet. On
the other hand, given any non-musical image it does not misinterpret
more than half of that amount as music. If such programs do exist, I'd
say that we have an AI algorithm strong enough for a visual music search
engine.

We could try and see. There are free versions and trial versions of OMR
software available out there.

---
Antti Kaihola
Sibelius-Academy, Helsinki, Finland
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  www.siba.fi/~akaihola

Päivän palindromi: "Narua, narua Laura nauran."
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Re: [abcusers] Finding music files

2001-01-06 Thread Phil Taylor

Antti Kaihola wrote:
On Sat, 06 Jan 2001, John Chambers wrote:

 So how does one go about identifying  which  of  the  graphics  files
 and/or PDF/PS files contain music?

 It seems to me that discovering that these contain music is far  from
 trivial.   For the gif and png files, it's probably not possible with
 the current state of AI.

I've tried some OMR (optical music recognition) programs, and although
their performance is still poor compared to OCR, I've been quite
impressed of what they can do.

Imagine we have an OMR package. It can recognize without help from the
user say 25 % of all musical symbols on an image of a music sheet. On
the other hand, given any non-musical image it does not misinterpret
more than half of that amount as music. If such programs do exist, I'd
say that we have an AI algorithm strong enough for a visual music search
engine.

We could try and see. There are free versions and trial versions of OMR
software available out there.


For some time I've been idly contemplating writing an OMR program which
would produca first draft abc from picture files.  The first task
such a program would have to perform is to locate the staves.  Now
a pattern of five equidistant horizontal lines is very distinctive,
and it's not hard to devise an algorithm that will detect it, even
if the lines are a few degrees off from the horizontal, as is likely
to be the case in many scans.

If all you want to do is decide whether a picture file contains music
you can probably make that decision with a high degree of accuracy
based on the presence or absence of staves.

Phil Taylor


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Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draft for V:)

2001-01-06 Thread Eric Galluzzo

Richard Robinson wrote:

 On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Wendy Galovich wrote:
 
 At 09:31 PM 1/5/2001 UTC, John Chambers wrote:
 
 ...  In a couple cases, people have scanned in music
 so that others can transcribe it to abc.  (This isn't unusual; it has
 been done with a lot of old documents, most notoriously with the Dead
 Sea Scrolls.)
 
  Really?? What do the Dead Sea Scrolls sound like in abc?? :-) 
 (Sorry John, I couldn't resist!) 
 
 
 Quite right too - it's the best bit of bait I've seen in ages :) Have they
 really ? All of them ? And are they available to anybody that might want
 to transcribe them ?
 
 I don't want to do that myself, you understand; just curious, because it
 was such a very long time that they weren't available.

On the other hand, I'm sure the copyright has expired by now

   - Eric

-- 
---=---=-=-==-===-=//===//=-===-==-=-=--=  -
"God is real, unless  // Name: // Eric Galluzzo // [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 declared integer."  // WWW:  // http://w3.one.net/~eng/
-- Unknown  // Work: // Synchrony // Product Engineer
---=-=-==-===-=//===//=-===-==-=-=--=  -

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Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draft for V:)

2001-01-06 Thread Eric Galluzzo

John Chambers wrote:

 Laura writes:
 | I think the problem is that parsing lilypond files is more complicated
 | because they potentially have more structure than ABC files, and can
 | have includes, etc.  I don't know how difficult what you do with the
 | ABC would be in practice.
 
 I think you're right. Includes are especially troublesome. The reason
 is  that  the directory structure that a program sees from the web is
 not necessarily the same as what a local program  sees  in  the  file
 system.   If  the  include  is  of a file in another directory, a web
 program can't always correctly calculate  what  the  URL  should  be.
 Probably  the only includes you could implement would be for files in
 the same directory.

True.  For example, most Lilypond files include (e.g.):

\include "paper16.ly"

where paper16.ly is a standard Lilypond include.  However, most actual 
includes that you'll care about would be local files, I imagine.  The 
only problem that I'd see there is if the Lilypond file is a symbolic 
link to somewhere on the file system that _really_ has the file in it, 
in which case the ancillary files might be in that directory.

 
 Of course, if lilypond had an include  that  used  URLs  rather  than
 local file names, this wouldn't be a problem. Such includes are quite
 easy to implement.

As far as I know, this isn't allowed with Lilypond.

 
 Another big problem I can see:  If my tune index includes, .lp files,
 people  will be expecting the tune finder to extract single tunes and
 return them in PS or GIF or MIDI or whatever formats. The obvious way
 to do this is an lp2abc script ...

Ack, no, definitely not.  Lilypond (.ly) files are much more complex 
than ABC files, and making a translator would be very difficult 
(although possible).  Lilypond includes a "ly2dvi" program which 
translates Lilypond to DVI and (optionally) PostScript and MIDI.  Now, 
the only tricky part is that within the .ly file itself is where the 
\paper {...} and \midi {...} declarations occur, which instruct ly2dvi 
to create paper and MIDI.  So you'd probably have to search in the .ly 
file and add your own \paper {} and \midi {} declarations if they 
weren't there (which they almost always are).

   - Eric

-- 
---=---=-=-==-===-=//===//=-===-==-=-=--=  -
"God is real, unless  // Name: // Eric Galluzzo // [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 declared integer."  // WWW:  // http://w3.one.net/~eng/
-- Unknown  // Work: // Synchrony // Product Engineer
---=-=-==-===-=//===//=-===-==-=-=--=  -

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Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draft for V:)

2001-01-06 Thread Gianni Cunich

On Juanury 4th John Henckel suggested to make the abc notation XML
compatible, but then said he had changed his mind since that would have
meant would sacrifying too much of the clarity and
usability of ABC.

Richard Robinsons replyed:

Have you ever looked at raw musixtex, as, eg, hint hint, output from
abc2mtex ? It's *far* nastier than that :)

Well, the first four bars of Jacob (or Enrico - English hornpipe appearing
in the Hardy family manuscript, for those which aren't familiar with it, and
in quite a few abc versions on the web), looks more or less like this:

\pnotes{2.83}\qu{'a}\en%
\xbar
\pnotes{2.83}\ql{'d}\en%
\pnotes{2.00}\ibl1{'f}{-2}\qb1f\tbl1\qb1e\ibl1c0\qb1d\qb1c\qb1d%
\tbl1\qb1b\en%
\xbar
\pnotes{2.00}\ibu1{'a}0\qb1a\qb1b\qb1a\tbu1\qb1{`g}\en%
\pnotes{2.83}\qu f\qu{'a}\en%
\xbar
\pnotes{2.83}\ql{'d}\en%
\pnotes{2.00}\ibl1{'e}2\qb1e\tbl1\qb1f\ibl1g0\qb1g\qb1f\qb1g\tbl1\qb1f%
\en%
\xbar
\pnotes{2.83}\ql{'e}\ql{'a}\ql a\qu{`a}\en%

Yes, those are just four bars of music, stipped of any comment lines, not to
tell of some 25/30 lines of header!

Yet, have a look at this please:

Title: Jacob or Enrico
Composer: traditional
Meter: 4/4
Sharps: 3
Style: SOLO

a4 | d f8 e d c d b | a b a g f4 a | d e8 f g f g f | e4 a a a- |

d f8 e d c d b | a b a g f4 a | d g8 f e d e c | d4 d d :| f8 g |

a4 a8 g f g f e | d e d c b4 b | g8+ a g f e f e d | c d c b a4 a4x3 b c |

d4 d c8 e c a | d4 d c8 e c a | d4 f e8 d e c | d4 d d :|

Now, have a look at its abc counterpart:

X:1
T: Jacob or Enrico
C: traditional
L: 1/8
M:4/4
K:D
A2 | d2fe dcdB | ABAG F2A2 | d2ef gfgf | e2a2 a2A2 |
d2fe dcdB | ABAG F2A2 | B2gf edec | d2d2 d2 :|
fg | a2ag fgfe | dedc B2B2 | gagf efed | cdcB A2(3ABc |
d2d2 cecA | d2d2 cecA | d2f2 edec | d2d2 d2 :|

Do you really think that the abc notation comes out as a clear winner in
terms of human readability? And if I had chosen a complex score (multistave,
multivoice, many lyric lines, guitar chords, marks...)...

Maybe having a look around to see what can be done with other typesetting
packages could be of some help in discussing the V: lines sintax.


Regards

Gianni


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Re: Why XML is a bad idea[longish] (was Re: [abcusers] draft for V:)

2001-01-06 Thread John Chambers

Eric writes:

|  I don't want to do that myself, you understand; just curious, because it
|  was such a very long time that they weren't available.
|
| On the other hand, I'm sure the copyright has expired by now

Part of the fun of this story was that the original "owners" tried to
make a copyright claim.  I think the courts just sorta snickered.

I suppose the idea isn't totally ludicrous, considering how copyright
is being stretched these days. The lawyers probably figured that they
could say that they were only claiming copyright on the  photos,  and
photos can be copyrighted, right?  Still, I think this was beyond the
credulence of the legal system, and the folks who put it online  seem
to have gotten away with it.

The NPR reports that I heard made it pretty obvious that  their  news
folks  thought  this  was a rather outrageous concept of "ownership",
and more of a thinly-disguised  case  of  censorship.   The  original
holders  of the Scrolls wanted to be the ones to do the interpreting,
and didn't at all like the idea of random religious riff-raff getting
their hands on the raw text.

The idea that the Scrolls might have contained music is enticing  and
not all that unlikely.  Alphabetic musical notation isn't at all new.
Chris Walshaw wasn't nearly the first one to come up with  the  idea.
(He  was likely the first one to program it, but MusicTeX was already
around, so it was just a matter of time.) Vaguely similar  text-based
musical  notation  was  in use in China and India many centuries ago,
and I've seen claims that the ancient Greeks did  something  similar.
Their  numbers  were, like the Hebrew numbers, based on using letters
to represent numbers, with alpha=1, beta=2 and so on. Supposedly some
of  the old Greek texts had "nonsense words" written below song text,
and those letters were really numbers representing notes in a  scale.
The  oriental  systems  were  similar.   It's  not all that different
conceptually from ABC.

Consider how the religious folks have tried to interpret the Book  of
Solomon  as  deeply religious text rather than the erotic poetry that
it really is.  It wouldn't be at all far-fetched for such  people  to
interpret  an Aramaic version of ABC-like notation as religious text.
And one of the properties of Hebrew/Aramaic is that usually only  the
consonants are written. It turns out that nearly every string of 3 or
4 consonants is a word, so you can "read" most  sequences  of  random
letters.  Whether this is sensible is another question.

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[abcusers] Hotbot can seach for ABC

2001-01-06 Thread John Henckel

At 01:26 PM 1/6/2001 +0100, you wrote:
Here are the 123 ABC sites I've listed at The Free Sheet Music Directory.


Hi Frank,

I discovered yesterday that HotBot can search for web pages that contain 
files with specified extensions.  When I told HotBot to search for all ABC 
files, it found 1100 web sites.  Many of the hits are bogus, but maybe 
you'll find some new ones like

http://members.iinet.net.au/~nickl/midi.html

The url for HotBoT to search for all ABC files is

http://hotbot.lycos.com/text/default.asp?FSU=1FS=abc



John Henckel  alt. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, USA   (507) 753-2216

http://geocities.com/jdhenckel/

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