Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Wil Macaulay writes: --- Due to popular demand, +...+ is now the preferred syntax for notating decorations; !...! has been deprecated, although it is still allowed. I thought ** was proposed? although deprecated, ++ is still around as an alternate to [...] for chords. In addition, +..+ looks ugly, to me, at least. Looked ugly for chords, still looks ugly for decorations. Oh well. But this raises another question: shouldn't the standard mention obsolete notation to alert future developers to stuff which might be expected to show up in old abc files? (It's not a very long list: +..+ for chords, s..s for slurs, and [1, [2 for repeats come to mind. **, *, + and/or !---depending on what is finally decided---are other cases in point. There are probably a couple more, but not many.) Abc2mtex has some flags: oldchords, oldslurs, which allow it to process these; I don't know if other programs handle them at all. Should they? Cheers, John Walsh To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 11:15:14PM -0700, John Walsh wrote: Wil Macaulay writes: --- Due to popular demand, +...+ is now the preferred syntax for notating decorations; !...! has been deprecated, although it is still allowed. I thought ** was proposed? although deprecated, ++ is still around as an alternate to [...] for chords. They were both proposed. In addition, +..+ looks ugly, to me, at least. Looked ugly for chords, still looks ugly for decorations. Oh well. But this raises another question: shouldn't the standard mention obsolete notation to alert future developers to stuff which might be expected to show up in old abc files? (It's not a very long list: +..+ for chords, s..s for slurs, and [1, [2 for repeats come to mind. **, *, + and/or !---depending on what is finally decided---are other cases in point. There are probably a couple more, but not many.) Abc2mtex has some flags: oldchords, oldslurs, which allow it to process these; I don't know if other programs handle them at all. Should they? AT least to list them, would be a good idea, so that if someone meets them in a tune and their program doesn't handle them, they'll know what they mean and be able to do the appropriate translation by hand. WRT [ repeats - this document gives the impression they are the preferred form, all the examples given use it. I notice that the way it notes that When adjacent to bar lines, these can be shortened to |1 and :|2 give the implication that [ repeat constructions can be used in mid bar. I've just checked, and see that the abc2pses will do this - is it generally acepted ? If so, there is reason to not regard these as obsolete, since this is something that can't be done with the |1 form (following on from which, I also notice none of them accept that A dotted bar line can be notated by preceding it with a dot, e.g. `.|') -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill wrote: 2. What's a roll (+roll+ in the decorations)? I've checked 6 music dictionaries and books on notation and the only rolls mentioned are for timpani or other percussion and notated as either tr or a tremolo. It is used at least in Irish music as a general ornamentation mark. I've come across the notation a.o. in Traditional Irish Music: Karen Tweed's Irish Choice, Dave Mallinson Publications, 1994. -- Bert Van Vreckem http://flanders.blackmill.net/ Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. -- Dave Barry To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: 1. In the table of ABC fields and their usage you have U:user defined still saying !trill! rather than +trill+ Fixed. 2. In the section O: origin the separator is miss-spelled. Fixed. 3. Shouldn't +..+ be deprecated for chords? It has been deprecated since ages. If people think it is useful, I will add a note about it. 1. Section Ties and Slurs: What does it mean to have a slur ending and starting on the same note? eg (E) You may just ignore it. However, packages that support Gregorian notation (i.e. Barfly) will attach meaning to this. 2. What's a roll (+roll+ in the decorations)? I've checked 6 music dictionaries and books on notation and the only rolls mentioned are for timpani or other percussion and notated as either tr or a tremolo. It seems to have something to do with Irish music. There is a picture of it in the symbols table. 3. I don't understand the sentence in K:Key which reads It is possible to use the format K:tonic accidentals to explicitly define all the accidentals of a mode: K:D b e ^f. But see my comment (2) below. An unfortunate typo. It should have been: K:D _b _e ^f Fixed. 4. Continuation of input lines. The last sentence says A double backslash (...) does not continue the current line but is interpreted as an actual backslash. But since an actual backslash means continue the current line this makes no sense. If a line is terminated with \\ then I would take that to mean the same as \. No, an actual backslash is a backslash that is interpreted as text, rather than as a continuation mark. E.G: W: this line ends in a back-shlash\\ Of course, this will only make sense in string fields, and not in general, so I will take this comment out of this section to prevent further confusion. Fixed. 5. No mention of midline What do you mean? 1. No ability to change clef in non-voiced music, the clef change is only in the voicing section. This means you can't write music for viola or cello. Please explain me what non-voiced music is, and how we should deal with it. Following the example in in K: Key that K:Dphr ^f would give a *key sig* of 2 flats and 1 sharp, this imples that the previously-quoted example K:D =c would have me put a key sig of F#, C# and then Cnat. Which if course is nonsense. Nope. There are to supported syntaxes: [A] K:tonicmode accidentals [B] K:tonic accidentals Syntax A will _modify_ the key signature of the mode given, rather than simply append accidentals to it. Example: K:Dmaj =c % will give F# Cnat Syntax B, which only contains the name of the tonic, and does not imply a mode, will allow you to spell out a key signature in full: K:D ^f =c % same meaning as above Note that in syntax B the tonic may be basically ignored by the parser; the tonic is only there to make the notation comprehensible to other users. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Bert Van Vreckem [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Bernard Hill wrote: 2. What's a roll (+roll+ in the decorations)? I've checked 6 music dictionaries and books on notation and the only rolls mentioned are for timpani or other percussion and notated as either tr or a tremolo. It is used at least in Irish music as a general ornamentation mark. I've come across the notation a.o. in Traditional Irish Music: Karen Tweed's Irish Choice, Dave Mallinson Publications, 1994. Thanks. But what does it mean? What would say an autoharp make of it, say perhaps to make it a tremolo. It means play any ornamentation here. The exact meaning is unspecified. -- Bert Van Vreckem http://flanders.blackmill.net/ Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. -- Dave Barry To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
I. Oppenheim wrote: I hereby publicly release the third draft revision of the ABC 2.0 standard: snip Please help me with identifying the errors and the mistakes in the draft. First of all: Guido, Irwin: well done! 1. Information Fields section: can the additional notes on fields be put in alphabetical order? 2. Note lengths: seems to be incomplete. There's no mention of things like A3/2, only in the broken rhythm example. A3/2 should obviously be parsed, but how far should an abc program go? Is A1531/3001 valid or not? Best to clarify this and define what's legal and what not. 3. Ties and slurs: and nested slurs in particular. How should they be parsed? E.g. is (CD (EF) GA) the same as _ CD EF GA (i.e. the first slur starts at C and ends at F, - the second slur starts at E and ends at A) or CD EF GA (1st slur starts at C and ends at A, -- 2nd slur starts at E and ends at F) Here, the second option seems to make more sense to me, but in the example in the standard (CD (E) FG), I would prefer the first interpretation... Please clarify 4. Accompaniment chords: is that a complete enumeration? If so, there's a few missing: sus2, sus4, 6-5, 6-9, e.g. cannot be expressed with the specified syntax. 5. Annotations: Using the '@' symbol leaves the exact placing of the string to the discretion of the interpreting program. This doesn't help me to understand how to use the @-symbol. Is this not part of the standard? Could you an example be included to clarify things? 6. Clefs: a typo below transpose=semitones: effect instead of affect 7. Deprecated continuations: the following fragment of code [...] was considered to be equivalent to [...] but no further explanation. If it is not equivalent anymore, what's the difference? Or is any of the two notations illegal in the new standard? Please clarify. 8. Stylesheet specification: Could you add an example of the use of $1-$4? -- Bert Van Vreckem http://flanders.blackmill.net/ Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. -- Dave Barry To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 08:55:54PM +0200, I. Oppenheim wrote: Please help me with identifying the errors and the mistakes in the draft. 1) It starts by saying The ABC standard itself deals only with structured, high-level information; how this information should be actually rendered by e.g. a typesetter or a player program, is dealt with in a separate standard. It then goes on to state where each field will be printed. This is at least inconsistent, and I don't think this is the right place for this level of detail. Better (IMO) would be if the proposed style-sheet mechanism allowed a way to control where, and which, fields the typesetting programs print, so that people can decide for themselves how they'd like things printed (I want different layouts for different purposes, for example) and still get consistent behaviour across different programs. One possibility My abc_rip, for instance, uses a %%RR-TextFormat: magic header line, which is a format string sort of thing in which any instances of T:, C:, etc are treated as fields and replaced by their values. Any including any %% specials. Including a %TUNE variable which is replaced by a picture of the tune (with no text), so that I can put things below as well as above. That's how I manage to print a copyright string under the dots. It's probably less than perfect, but for me it works better than anything else I've seen. 2) I'd like more discussion of the redefining of A: as Author (of lyrics), and consequent redefining of O: to hold the area information that A: has been used for in the past. Jack suggested this, and it may may well be a good idea, but I haven't heard much comment from anyone else here, and I'd like to be sure we've thought it through. I have an interest here, since I use A:==area heavily; and since, as Jack noted, I use this with multiple O:'s, relying on human intelligence to make sense of possible confusion, it wouldn't be a simple editing job; so I'd like to be sure we all agree it's The Right Thing To Do before I do it. One thing I notice about the proposal for O: is that it introduces (for the first time, I _think_) a hierarchical structuring of information within a field (A: as area did that across different fields, of course, and I agree with Jack that it's not altogether nice). I wonder if there are maybe any catches to this ? One minor point, for example - the recommendations for which fields to print where (see 1 above) would lead to the whole lot getting printed, without any associated syntax for picking out sub-fields (I might want to print just the country, as I can at the moment, for example). Does any other software do anything with these information fields ? There are possibilities with external programs, of course, like the $ grep O: | cut -d ',' -f 1 example I gave earlier, which is why I argued (and repeated offlist to Irwin) the case for most-significant-first ordering rather than Jack's little-endian example. Special-case treatment of the O: field. That's what bothers me. It's the need for a delimiter character. My scripts, for example, which generate the listings for my web collection - since I list (and allow searching) these by country, and definitely don't want separate entries for, eg, England and England, NW I'll have to pick out all info up to the first comma. If I do that to any other field things'll go wrong, since comma doesn't mean delimiter anywhere else (and I can't think of any other character to which this wouldn't apply). Which is not the end of the world, of course. I can do that if I have to. But it's the sort of complication that makes me wonder if it's really the right way to go. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 12:26:09PM +0200, Bert Van Vreckem wrote: Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Bert Van Vreckem [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Bernard Hill wrote: 2. What's a roll (+roll+ in the decorations)? I've checked 6 music dictionaries and books on notation and the only rolls mentioned are for timpani or other percussion and notated as either tr or a tremolo. It is used at least in Irish music as a general ornamentation mark. I've come across the notation a.o. in Traditional Irish Music: Karen Tweed's Irish Choice, Dave Mallinson Publications, 1994. Thanks. But what does it mean? What would say an autoharp make of it, say perhaps to make it a tremolo. It means play any ornamentation here. The exact meaning is unspecified. I rather like ~ - play a squiggle. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 11:41:39AM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: Strange key sigs such as the above (while clear in intent) are very non-standard. Are they really necessary? I've never played from one and would actually find it very difficult to play _b ^f See http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/RRTuneBk/gettune/0c54.html for an example of how they can be useful. Helpful for the typing, and (IMO) more helpful in that they show the rules that apply, instead of just confronting people with lots of accidental notes. (note to self. fix middle sections, so that D maj. doesn't look strange either) -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 08:55:54PM +0200, I. Oppenheim wrote: Please help me with identifying the errors and the mistakes in the draft. Order of ABC constructs should include all possibilities. Tuplets are missing, for example. I suggest structuring this list - like, spell out the ordering of symbols which apply to a single note, then treat this as a note in an ordering of larger constructs ? -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: 5. No mention of midline What do you mean? Sorry, I abandoned a comment and forgot to complete it. I am thinking of the midline field in Clefs. I'm not sure what you mean. [K: clef=bass] or [K: bass] is legal. I should have said non-Multiple Voiced Music: ie that which does not have any V: fields. All your clef definitions are in the Multiple Voice music section, so how to write the clef for viola music is not clear. The standard says in the key section: See section Clefs for details how to change the clef using the K field. And in the clef section: A clef specification may be provided in K: and V: fields. So [K: clef=alto] or [K: alto] will do the job. I guess I should make this clearer in the standard. Strange key sigs such as the above (while clear in intent) are very non-standard. Are they really necessary? I've never played from one and would actually find it very difficult to play _b ^f They are non standard in Western music, but you will find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). Anyway: have you abandoned the global accidentals idea? Most people on the list seemed to prefer explicit accidentals over global accidentals. Of course, we could introduce a %% directive like %%global-accidentals 1 to change the standard interpretation of the [K:] field. Should I add that? Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Richard Robinson wrote: It then goes on to state where each field will be printed. This is at least inconsistent, and I don't think this is the right place for this level of detail. Note that it says: Note that is only indicative, users may change the formatting by providing stylesheet directives or setting options in the software they use. So the standard in fact recommends the usage of %%-style layout directives. Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 11:41:39AM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: Strange key sigs such as the above (while clear in intent) are very non-standard. Are they really necessary? I've never played from one and would actually find it very difficult to play _b ^f See http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/RRTuneBk/gettune/0c54.html for an example of how they can be useful. Helpful for the typing, and (IMO) more helpful in that they show the rules that apply, instead of just confronting people with lots of accidental notes. Ouch! The meaning may be clear, but much better with individual flats imo! I find it very hard to play correctly! (And why sharpen the fs in stave 5?) And from the abc source you have written K:A_b^f^c shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: 5. No mention of midline What do you mean? Sorry, I abandoned a comment and forgot to complete it. I am thinking of the midline field in Clefs. I'm not sure what you mean. [K: clef=bass] or [K: bass] is legal. Is it? I couldn't find it. Anyway the midline field attempted to define the middle line of say the bass clef as D or D, to avoid too many leger lines. I never liked it anyway so glad it's gone. I should have said non-Multiple Voiced Music: ie that which does not have any V: fields. All your clef definitions are in the Multiple Voice music section, so how to write the clef for viola music is not clear. The standard says in the key section: See section Clefs for details how to change the clef using the K field. And in the clef section: A clef specification may be provided in K: and V: fields. So [K: clef=alto] or [K: alto] will do the job. Then it should not be a subheading of the Multiple Voices section, but explicitly part of the K: Key section. Or at least say the syntax is [K: | V:] [clef=] clef name .. etc I looked in vain for any examples such as you have written above: the context indicated it was firmly fixed to V: notation. I guess I should make this clearer in the standard. :-) Strange key sigs such as the above (while clear in intent) are very non-standard. Are they really necessary? I've never played from one and would actually find it very difficult to play _b ^f They are non standard in Western music, but you will find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). Anyway: have you abandoned the global accidentals idea? Most people on the list seemed to prefer explicit accidentals over global accidentals. Hm. I didn't see any discussion... Of course, we could introduce a %% directive like %%global-accidentals 1 to change the standard interpretation of the [K:] field. Should I add that? No. I suggest you allow software to create either individual (global) accidentals or strange key sigs. My own software (to which abc is simply an add-on importing/exporting module) does not support strange key sigs so I will have to do this anyway. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bert Van Vreckem writes: | | 2. Note lengths: seems to be incomplete. There's no mention of things | like A3/2, only in the broken rhythm example. A3/2 should obviously be | parsed, but how far should an abc program go? Is A1531/3001 valid or | not? Best to clarify this and define what's legal and what not. This has always been one of my favorite examples of a case where abc can express something that traditional staff notation can't. And we've seen a few examples of this on this list. Some of the midi-to-abc translators will produce such notation, when the midi originated as input from an instrument. All we really need is the comment that, while arbitrary fractions are legal in abc, it is unwise to use any denominator that is not a power of 2, because the result can't be translated to staff notation. More problematic (because novices are likely to do this) is a note length like 5/4, which looks simple, but also can't be written as a single note in standard staff notation. I think that some abc programs try to translate such things into sets of tied notes, but we can expect that few programs will ever do this. A general comment that Note lengths that can't be translated to conventional staff notation should be avoided is probably the best way to handle this. One of the routine observations from linguists is that, given any two languages, you can always find things in either that can't be accurately translated to the other. This is a problem that's not worth trying to solve. You won't succeed. The best you can do is note the problem and proceed. (One textbook example for English is the lack of any word that is the singular form of cattle. Other languages have such words, and they can't be translated to English with a single word. But you aren't going to fix the English language; all you can do is chuckle and use a phrase that includes or for your translation.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: [K: clef=bass] or [K: bass] is legal. Is it? I couldn't find it. Anyway the midline field attempted to define the middle line of say the bass clef as D or D, to avoid too many leger lines. I never liked it anyway so glad it's gone. It's not gone! you can still type: [K: bass middle=D transpose=-2] or whatever you like. BTW, There is no difference between what you can achieve with separate K: lines and [K:] midline fields So [K: clef=alto] or [K: alto] will do the job. Then it should not be a subheading of the Multiple Voices section, That is a good point! I'll put it into a separate section. but explicitly part of the K: Key section. No, clef/middle/transpose can be used both with K:, and V: fields. Or at least say the syntax is [K: | V:] [clef=] clef name .. etc NB: You may mix the clef specifiers with the special specifiers of the K: and V: fields. I looked in vain for any examples such as you have written above: the context indicated it was firmly fixed to V: notation. The section already contained this example: [V:Clarinet] [K:C transpose=-2] Of course, we could introduce a %% directive like %%global-accidentals 1 to change the standard interpretation of the [K:] field. Should I add that? No. I suggest you allow software to create either individual (global) accidentals or strange key sigs. My own software (to which abc is simply an add-on importing/exporting module) does not support strange key sigs so I will have to do this anyway. I will add a note about this. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | There are to supported syntaxes: | [A] K:tonicmode accidentals | [B] K:tonic accidentals | | Syntax A will _modify_ the key signature of the mode | given, rather than simply append accidentals to it. | Example: | | K:Dmaj =c % will give F# Cnat | | Syntax B, which only contains the name of the tonic, | and does not imply a mode, will allow you to spell out | a key signature in full: | | K:D ^f =c % same meaning as above | | Note that in syntax B the tonic may be basically | ignored by the parser; the tonic is only there to make | the notation comprehensible to other users. In several discussions, we've also had a number of people request that the tonic be officially optional. One reason is to help in transcriptions where the transcriber may get the key wrong. One objection has been the fear that if we allow this, then tonics will disappear. I suspect that this won't happen at all. Even musicians who are relatively ignorant of music theory understand what it means to say that a tune is in G or in E minor. It's very rare for musicians to tell you the key signature; they usually give you the tonic and/or the mode (even if they don't know those terms). And the counter-argument to this has been from people who feel that it's better to not give the tonic than to give the wrong tonic. This is a matter of personal preference, I suppose. And how liberal an abc program wants to be is probably a matter of the programmer's personal preference. We've already seen that putting global accidentals in the 1.6 standard didn't mean that many programmers would implement it. The same probably applies here. | Strange key sigs such as the above (while clear in intent) are very | non-standard. Are they really necessary? I've never played from one and | would actually find it very difficult to play _b ^f They aren't at all strange to a lot of us. Even music publishers are now accepting such things. For example, Mel Bay's recent (and well done) klezmer collection has a lot of non-classical key signatures. A lot depends on what music you play. Part of the pressure for more extensions in abc is from people playing music other than traditional British Isles folk music. Sorry, folks; the musical weirdos have discovered abc, like it, and want to use it. | Anyway: have you abandoned the global accidentals idea? I thought it | very good actually. In fact some Bach is written that way - he writes a | key sig of 1 flat and manually flattens every E and ends on a G minor | chord! Yeah; I've noticed that in urtext editions. I think what was really going on was that the official notation for minor hadn't quite stabilized back then. Bach and some others would use a dorian key signature for minor at times, possibly depending on their feel for which would use the fewer accidentals. I've seen the same thing in urtext editions of Handel, Quantz, Vivaldi and the Louillets, for example. Our notions of the rules for classical key signatures really weren't firm until around 1800 or so. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] Re: ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
K:A_b^f^c shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? and a lot of other stuff around the same subject. Perhaps it's time to plug my idea of - K:_b^f^c tonic=A mode=whatever Completely unambiguous. Talking of which, are there any plans for a procedure for amendments or extensions to the standard or do we just stick to the implement your favourite idea and argue about it afterwards system we have now? Bryan Creer
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes There are to supported syntaxes: [A] K:tonicmode accidentals [B] K:tonic accidentals This is actually a bit counterintuitive, since K:D means D major (= 2 sharps) while K:D ^f means D mix (= 1 sharp) Not that there are many tunes about currently which use global accidentals, but the second interpretation of the symbol D breaks the old standard. If the symbol D is to be interpreted in a new way (i.e. as tonic, rather than as a D major key signature) I'd rather it was explicitly labelled as such, i.e. K: tonic=D ^f or some such. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Richard Robinson writes: | On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 01:15:54PM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: | | And from the abc source you have written | | K:A_b^f^c | | shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? | | It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. | | It's K:Asomething since A seems, to me, the root note. Amix would have | been better - I have a vague memory that I tried that and it didn't work | at the time, so the result's a kludge. But it does now. | | It would seem more logical to write just K:Amix _B to get Bb and the | usual 2 sharps, but in abc2mps that produces a sig with 1 flat, only, | so the full spelling out seems necessary. OTOH, the shorter version | works with jcabc2ps, but that doesn't accept spaces in it. I rather | prefer the appearance from abcm2ps - and, spelling all the accidentals | out seems to let me control which order they're shown in, which is nice ... | If I use K:Amix_B^f^c in jcabc2ps it prints the sharps twice. (Hmmm ... I tried to make it accept spaces. Maybe I'd better do a bit more debugging.) Anyway, after playing around with such key signatures a bit, it quickly became obvious that, if an explicit list of accidentals is included, then the mode should *not* default to major. This would produce some very baffled users. The right default is no mode, i.e., no accidentals other than what is listed. To see why, consider a simple case like E hejaz/freygish, which is E F ^G A B c d e Any musician who knows what this sort of scale is will write this: K:E^G If the default is major, then the musician will get a result that is indistinguishable from E major. The ^G may be shown twice (in both octaves), which will be even more confusing. The only solution would be to write this: K:Ephr^G Now this may seem reasonable, because in fact it's exactly right. But it has one serious problem: You need to use a different mode for each tonic note. This will make sense to someone intricately familiar with the classical European modes. But to the other 99% of the musicians in the world, it will be utterly baffling. If I want to do the same thing with a tonic of A, I'll have to write something like: K:Amin_B^c These are the same sort of scale. That is, they really are the same mode. But I'd have to write a different mode name for each, and the name has no obvious relation to the actual mode. The reason is that the mode would be used solely to cancel the major key signature. This would be hopeless, and would defeat the whole purpose of having an explicit key signature. So the right way to do it is to accept either a mode or a list of accidentals, or both. Only if both are missing do you assume major. OTOH, I do like to use both. If you use K:Ephr^G, you can tranpose it down a step by just writing K:Dphr^F, and transposing it to A is then K:Aphr^c. You just do the same shift to the tonic and to all the accidentals. If you use K:E^G, then transposing to A would give you K:A_B^c, which isn't quite as trivial. I've gotta make sure that spaces are accepted everywhere here ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 04:03:23PM +0100, Phil Taylor wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes There are to supported syntaxes: [A] K:tonicmode accidentals [B] K:tonic accidentals This is actually a bit counterintuitive, since K:D means D major (= 2 sharps) while K:D ^f means D mix (= 1 sharp) Not that there are many tunes about currently which use global accidentals, but the second interpretation of the symbol D breaks the old standard. Yes. The least necessary change would be to require explicit Dmaj, which would label a bare D as tonic. But all of this breaks with what's Already Out There. If the symbol D is to be interpreted in a new way (i.e. as tonic, rather than as a D major key signature) I'd rather it was explicitly labelled as such, i.e. K: tonic=D ^f or some such. As with Bryan's suggestion, I'd prefer to keep the simplicity of searching for K:tonic to find all tunes that sit on tonic. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers]ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
John == John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: John Next you'll be telling us that Britney Spears is a musician ... Does she follow standards? -- Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ ) (617) 661-8097 fax: (801) 365-6574 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139 To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 03:17:52PM +, John Chambers wrote: Richard Robinson writes: | On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 01:15:54PM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: | | And from the abc source you have written | | K:A_b^f^c | | shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? | | It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. | | It's K:Asomething since A seems, to me, the root note. Amix would have | been better - I have a vague memory that I tried that and it didn't work | at the time, so the result's a kludge. But it does now. | | It would seem more logical to write just K:Amix _B to get Bb and the | usual 2 sharps, but in abc2mps that produces a sig with 1 flat, only, | so the full spelling out seems necessary. OTOH, the shorter version | works with jcabc2ps, but that doesn't accept spaces in it. I rather | prefer the appearance from abcm2ps - and, spelling all the accidentals | out seems to let me control which order they're shown in, which is nice ... | If I use K:Amix_B^f^c in jcabc2ps it prints the sharps twice. (Hmmm ... I tried to make it accept spaces. Maybe I'd better do a bit more debugging.) jcabc2ps vjc.1.1.0 (2003.01.27, std) compiled Jul 11 2003, by the way. (Maybe I'd better a do a bit more checking) ... the Amix was upsetting it. It'll take K:A ^f_B^c correctly, but a space after the ^f hides subsequent accidentals. Anyway, after playing around with such key signatures a bit, it quickly became obvious that, if an explicit list of accidentals is included, then the mode should *not* default to major. This would produce some very baffled users. The right default is no mode, i.e., no accidentals other than what is listed. To see why, consider a simple case like E hejaz/freygish, which is E F ^G A B c d e Any musician who knows what this sort of scale is will write this: K:E^G If the default is major, then the musician will get a result that is indistinguishable from E major. The ^G may be shown twice (in both octaves), which will be even more confusing. The only solution would be to write this: K:Ephr^G Or K:E=f=c^G=d ? Longer, but maybe clearer. Now this may seem reasonable, because in fact it's exactly right. But it has one serious problem: You need to use a different mode for each tonic note. This will make sense to someone intricately familiar with the classical European modes. But to the other 99% of the musicians in the world, it will be utterly baffling. If I want to do the same thing with a tonic of A, I'll have to write something like: K:Amin_B^c These are the same sort of scale. That is, they really are the same mode. But I'd have to write a different mode name for each, and the name has no obvious relation to the actual mode. The reason is that the mode would be used solely to cancel the major key signature. This would be hopeless, and would defeat the whole purpose of having an explicit key signature. So the right way to do it is to accept either a mode or a list of accidentals, or both. Only if both are missing do you assume major. This makes sense to me, I think. My experience if transcribing things like this is the actual pitch of the notes becomes clear fairly quickly, while actually trying to get the thing down. But I may then want to change my mind about the root note later. So it's nice to be able to change just the one letter without any implications on the rest of the line. OTOH, I do like to use both. If you use K:Ephr^G, you can tranpose it down a step by just writing K:Dphr^F, and transposing it to A is then K:Aphr^c. You just do the same shift to the tonic and to all the accidentals. If you use K:E^G, then transposing to A would give you K:A_B^c, which isn't quite as trivial. *sigh* yes. So how to reconcile these ? If accidentals are given on a K: line, then if a mode is given you get the second usage, just above, and if it's just a bare notename you get the first usage ? -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Cattle
Phil Taylor writes: | John Chambers wrote: | | (One textbook example for English is the lack of any word that is the | singular form of cattle. Other languages have such words, and they | can't be translated to English with a single word. But you aren't | going to fix the English language; all you can do is chuckle and use | a phrase that includes or for your translation.) | | The singular of cattle is cow. Not cow or bull; the word cow | is both the name of the species and of a female individual of that | species. I actually ran into this problem when writing up my PhD | thesis (which was on the biochemistry of semen). I referred to | bull semen at one point and my supervisor (himself a world expert | in the field of Reproductive Biology) wanted it changed to cow semen. Well, I doubt if you'd find any agreement on this among many native speakers. People can make up such rules all they like, but it'll have little effect on the rest of us. And cow or bull isn't even sufficient. These don't include steer or heifer, which are members of the same species. There is little trouble finding similar terminology problems in the various kinds of music that we all play here. | Now look here boss, I'm a country boy. I live on a farm. Let me | explain something to you... I milked a few cows when I was little ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Re: About the choice of '!'
Eric wrote So this way, by allowing !, !...! and *=!, everyone would be happy, and I don't know the reason why this thread lasts so long. The reason the thread is lasting so long is that not everyone would be happy with this. The use of abc for printing classical etc music is fairly recent and is to be encouraged but not if it messes up the abc of the original folk users. I vote to change the !--! usage to *--* or some other unused symbol. Ray To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] Re: ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard wrote- 2. |: at the beginning of a section is not ugly. And I do not like being forced to accept incorrect notation in that if a |: is missing then the repeat should be made from the previous double bar. But it *is* ugly at the beginning of a piece. Apparently, Beethoven agreed. Open the score of any of his symphonies (or any other classical sonata-allegro movement, for that matter) and note that there is no opening |: although the first section repeats. It cannot be bad abc to preserve this. Also, Irwin: a minor request: All over your page, you use ` and ' as open and close quotes, respectively when referring to symbols. The first one, in particular, looks so odd that one is tempted to think it is part of the notation being referred to. Couldn't you use ' or or even curly quotes instead to make it flow more smoothly? Thanks David Barnert Albany, NY To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Richard Robinson writes: | The only solution would be to write this: |K:Ephr^G | | Or K:E=f=c^G=d ? Longer, but maybe clearer. Actually, I do include accidentals with this scale at times. The main reason is that with: K:E^g many musicians will not notice the subtle positioning of the sharp on the g space, and will see it as ^f, giving E minor. If you're going to do this, it's better to write: K:E=f^g This is another advisory accidental, of course. But if you write: K:E^G this isn't as big a problem. Musicians who know only classical key signatures will usually notice that there's something highly unusual here, and will see where the sharp is positioned. Still, I've sometimes written: K:E=F^G This is *really* obvious that there's something funny going on. I do like the look of this one. It's so blatantly non-classical. Anyway, the best way to approach this is probably to treat bo the mode and any explicit accidentals as giving the key signature, so major should not be assumed. You only assume major if there is no key-signature information at all. One thing that falls out of my code is that K: is legal. It is equivalent to K:none, of course, not K:C. The difference is left as an exercise for the reader. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 04:12:38PM +, John Chambers wrote: Richard Robinson writes: | The only solution would be to write this: |K:Ephr^G | | Or K:E=f=c^G=d ? Longer, but maybe clearer. Actually, I do include accidentals with this scale at times. The main reason is that with: Oh, dear, confusing. I'm sorry, I meant on the opposite assumption, that that implied Emajor. K:E=F^G This is *really* obvious that there's something funny going on. I do like the look of this one. It's so blatantly non-classical. Cor. yes, it's definitely eye catching. Anyway, the best way to approach this is probably to treat bo the mode and any explicit accidentals as giving the key signature, so major should not be assumed. You only assume major if there is no key-signature information at all. This seems both expressive and comprehensible, and retains backwards compatability as well. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers]ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
David Barnert wrote: | Bernard wrote- | | 2. |: at the beginning of a section is not ugly. And I do | not like being forced to accept incorrect notation in that | if a |: is missing then the repeat should be made from the | previous double bar. | | But it *is* ugly at the beginning of a piece. Apparently, | Beethoven agreed. Open the score of any of his symphonies (or | any other classical sonata-allegro movement, for that | matter) and note that there is no opening |: although the | first section repeats. It cannot be bad abc to preserve this. Well, ugly is in the eye of the beholder. One of the common problems in orchestra and band rehearsals is getting the initial counting correct. If the instruments don't all start together, and the music doesn't start exactly on a bar line, it's fairly common for people to have different understanding of when they are to come in. Sometimes this can only be resolved by showing the full score to some of the later entrants, so they can copy some cue notes to their page. This could all be solved if everyone's part had a clear [| or |: at the beginning, with however many rests your part has before you are to start. If the initial bar line and rests are omitted, the result is very often mass confusion and a lot of work to coordinate all the entries correctly. Labelling the first bar line with a big, fat A will also help. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes If I had my druthers, I'd put a rule in saying that beginnings of repeated sections *must* be marked properly. But of course that's dreaming yet another impossible dream. Well in Music Publisher it refuses to play the music observing the repeats until you *have* put a |: in. (Excepting the first repeat of course). And I don't expect to remove that restriction. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Or K:E=f=c^G=d ? Longer, but maybe clearer. K:C ^g looks fine to me. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes And from the abc source you have written K:A_b^f^c shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. So you are saying that K:A has 3 sharps K:A _b has no sharps and one flat instead? This is totally illogical. I can understand K:A _b to mean 3 sharps and add a b flat but what now is the significance of the A? It's K:Asomething since A seems, to me, the root note. Amix would have been better - I have a vague memory that I tried that and it didn't work at the time, so the result's a kludge. But it does now. The root note is totally irrelevant to anything. As you indicate, sometimes there is argument about it anyway. Now I don't really mind having minor keys as they are well established, and maybe even the modes but in the case of made-up key signatures described exactly in a K: format I don't see the point. Make that K:_b^f^c in your example above. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Actually, I've seen music with nested repeats that work exactly like parentheses. I've even used this on occasion myself. Granted, most musicians have probably never seen this. But I've found that it doesn't even take explantion; musicians usually seem to understand it without even thinking about it. That's exactly my point. Here's some music: | | :| | | :| Now, where is the 2nd repeat to go back to? It *might* well be the beginning - the music notation has to be explicit. Either it's | | :| |:.. | | :| or it's | | :| | | | | | :| | | | Remember cut-and-paste is easy in abc tunes so maybe we should do away with repeat signs entirely g Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Cattle
on 7/29/03 11:03 AM, Phil Taylor wrote: The singular of cattle is cow. [...] I referred to bull semen at one point and my supervisor (himself a world expert in the field of Reproductive Biology) wanted it changed to cow semen. I saw a man milk a bull, fie, man, fie. I saw a man milk a bull, who's the fool now? I saw a man milk a bull, Every pull a bucketful. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Re: ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Bernard wrote- 2. |: at the beginning of a section is not ugly. And I do not like being forced to accept incorrect notation in that if a |: is missing then the repeat should be made from the previous double bar. But it *is* ugly at the beginning of a piece. Apparently, Beethoven agreed. Open the score of any of his symphonies (or any other classical sonata-allegro movement, for that matter) and note that there is no opening |: although the first section repeats. It cannot be bad abc to preserve this. I did not say beginning of a piece I said beginning of a section. It has always been standard notation to assume the first repeat is from the beginning of the work. We are talking about | . | | :| | . | | :| which is ambiguous. And should maybe be | . | | :| |:.. | . | | :| I am always happy to keep the assumed back to the beginning repeat in stave 1 above. It's the 2nd stave of the top I object to. Also, Irwin: a minor request: All over your page, you use ` and ' as open and close quotes, respectively when referring to symbols. The first one, in particular, looks so odd that one is tempted to think it is part of the notation being referred to. Couldn't you use ' or or even curly quotes instead to make it flow more smoothly? Hear, hear. Either use back and forth quotes ‘ ’ (Latin-1 charset decimal 145 and 146) or standard ' (decimal 39) for both. To mix ` (ascii 96) with ' is very untidy and illogical. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steven Bennett [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Bert Van Vreckem wrote: That all said, I don't think I've ever actually *seen* any Irish music with a roll ornament actually placed (didn't even know there was a symbol for it until I read this thread...) -- as I said before, Irish players prefer to ornament as they see fit, so the idea of actually writing an ornament on the music seems like you're telling them they can't do that... Of course, most of my written Irish music is tin whistle oriented -- maybe that symbol is used more in fiddle or pipe music. Well it's not known in pipe music. They use a particular form of embellishment known generically as a doubling and it takes many forms, which are written out. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:11:44PM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes And from the abc source you have written K:A_b^f^c shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. So you are saying that K:A has 3 sharps K:A _b has no sharps and one flat instead? This is totally illogical. I can understand K:A _b to mean 3 sharps and add a b flat but what now is the significance of the A? As I said, Amix would have been better. What I was trying to notate was a key signature of Bb f# c# So, having clarified my mind, I hope, thanks to John, either K:Amix Bb or K:A _Bb ^f ^c since in the 1st, stating the mode brings its keysig in, and in the 2nd, not stating it doesn't imply any key signature. In either case, the significance of the A is that it's the root note of the tune. The root note is totally irrelevant to anything. I don't think so. As you indicate, sometimes there is argument about it anyway. I said I might change my mind about what it is. That hardly implies that it doesn't exist. But the indication that I'd think about it suggests that I'd then like to record it. As I can. Now I don't really mind having minor keys as they are well established, and maybe even the modes Very tolerant of you ;) but in the case of made-up key signatures described exactly in a K: format I don't see the point. Make that K:_b^f^c in your example above. As above, I wouldn't want to have to throw the root note away. Why should I, what's the advantage ? -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | | If I had my druthers, I'd put a rule in saying that beginnings of | repeated sections *must* be marked properly. But of course that's | dreaming yet another impossible dream. | | Well in Music Publisher it refuses to play the music observing the | repeats until you *have* put a |: in. (Excepting the first repeat of | course). And I don't expect to remove that restriction. What I've thought a player should do if any phrase after the first is missing its initial repeat is to split into a polyphonic mode and start playing simultaneously from the beginning and just after the last end-repeat. This would be an accurate rendition of how a group of musicians would be expected to read such notation. (Also known as Hey, let's play it as a round! ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson | [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | | Or K:E=f=c^G=d ? Longer, but maybe clearer. | | K:C ^g looks fine to me. Well, it looks fine, but it has the wrong tonic. This doesn't matter on paper. But there are those of us who take advantage of the computer's ability to find stuff for us. This would cause it to match a search for tunes in C, which is not what you want if the tonic is E. This is part of the argument for making the tonic optional. K:C^g is misleading and causes bad matches. K:^g would be better, because it wouldn't give a mismatch. It wouldn't match a search for any tonic, of course, which is one of the reasons you'd prefer to have the tonic present. But at least it wouldn't match the wrong tonic. Of course, such searches are always prone to failure because people just give the wrong key. It's common to see K:G for tunes in E minor or A dorian. There's not a lot we can do about this except try to educate people. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | | If I had my druthers, I'd put a rule in saying that beginnings of | repeated sections *must* be marked properly. But of course that's | dreaming yet another impossible dream. | | Well in Music Publisher it refuses to play the music observing the | repeats until you *have* put a |: in. (Excepting the first repeat of | course). And I don't expect to remove that restriction. What I've thought a player should do if any phrase after the first is missing its initial repeat is to split into a polyphonic mode and start playing simultaneously from the beginning and just after the last end-repeat. This would be an accurate rendition of how a group of musicians would be expected to read such notation. ROFL! (Also known as Hey, let's play it as a round! ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/list s.html Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
| In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson | | K:A_b^f^c | shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? | | It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. | | So you are saying that | | K:A has 3 sharps | | K:A _b has no sharps and one flat instead? | | This is totally illogical. I can understand K:A _b to mean 3 sharps and | add a b flat but what now is the significance of the A? It's quite logical. K:A has a tonic but no scale information, so we assume major (^f^c^g). K:Amix has a tonic and a mode; the signature is ^f^c. K:A_B has a tonic and a key signature, which is _B K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. You assume a major scale if they don't give you any clues about the scale. Knowing the tonic is always nice, but standard staff notation shows that it isn't necessary. Experience with abc shows that musicians like to know the tonic anyway, and classical terminology often tells you the tonic and mode in the title, so we should encourage it. An example of an unnecessary tonic, from a klezmer context: K:^G could mean either K:D^G or K:E^G. There are other possibilities, but these are the two most likely. Of course, you can usually tell which it is by the end of the first bar, but it's nice to know up front. And it's especially nice if you're asking the computer to find you some tunes in E something. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:20:26PM +, John Chambers wrote: Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson | [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | | Or K:E=f=c^G=d ? Longer, but maybe clearer. | | K:C ^g looks fine to me. Well, it looks fine, but it has the wrong tonic. This doesn't matter on paper. But there are those of us who take advantage of the computer's ability to find stuff for us. This would cause it to match a search for tunes in C, which is not what you want if the tonic is E. This is part of the argument for making the tonic optional. K:C^g is misleading and causes bad matches. K:^g would be better, because it wouldn't give a mismatch. It wouldn't match a search for any tonic, of course, which is one of the reasons you'd prefer to have the tonic present. But at least it wouldn't match the wrong tonic. Of course, such searches are always prone to failure because people just give the wrong key. It's common to see K:G for tunes in E minor or A dorian. There's not a lot we can do about this except try to educate people. If I had them locally (the tunes, not the people) it might be worth considering a single-character key sig as a flag for this might need changing :-) -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:11:44PM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes And from the abc source you have written K:A_b^f^c shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. So you are saying that K:A has 3 sharps K:A _b has no sharps and one flat instead? This is totally illogical. I can understand K:A _b to mean 3 sharps and add a b flat but what now is the significance of the A? As I said, Amix would have been better. What I was trying to notate was a key signature of Bb f# c# So, having clarified my mind, I hope, thanks to John, either K:Amix Bb or K:A _Bb ^f ^c since in the 1st, stating the mode brings its keysig in, and in the 2nd, not stating it doesn't imply any key signature. In either case, the significance of the A is that it's the root note of the tune. The root note is totally irrelevant to anything. I don't think so. As you indicate, sometimes there is argument about it anyway. I said I might change my mind about what it is. That hardly implies that it doesn't exist. But the indication that I'd think about it suggests that I'd then like to record it. As I can. Now I don't really mind having minor keys as they are well established, and maybe even the modes Very tolerant of you ;) Well they're not really needed now, are they? There's no separate notation for them. However I had not allowed for the use of abc files as a database. In that case I can see a use for a tonic= or mode description. but in the case of made-up key signatures described exactly in a K: format I don't see the point. Make that K:_b^f^c in your example above. As above, I wouldn't want to have to throw the root note away. Why should I, what's the advantage ? As I have proposed in another post, how about K:_b^f^c tonic=A ? Bernard Hill Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 06:23:26PM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | | If I had my druthers, I'd put a rule in saying that beginnings of | repeated sections *must* be marked properly. But of course that's | dreaming yet another impossible dream. | | Well in Music Publisher it refuses to play the music observing the | repeats until you *have* put a |: in. (Excepting the first repeat of | course). And I don't expect to remove that restriction. What I've thought a player should do if any phrase after the first is missing its initial repeat is to split into a polyphonic mode and start playing simultaneously from the beginning and just after the last end-repeat. This would be an accurate rendition of how a group of musicians would be expected to read such notation. ROFL! (Also known as Hey, let's play it as a round! ;-) Another fine product for abc international. Reminds me, I still haven't got round to that random pipe-march generator. This is probably a Good Thing. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill writes: | My suggestion is that accidentals are in lower case, keys in upper. And | if the key name is missing then C is assumed. | | K:A ^b is F# C# G# and Bb. | K:A =c is F# and G# | K:_b^f is Bb and F# | | K:_b is Bb | K:C _b | K:F | | and the last 3 are equivalent of course. No, the accidentals should be case sensitive. I might not care about this, personally, but I've seen the explanations. When the topic has come up in the past, several people have pointed out that there are musical styles that use different accidentals in two octaves. The examples I've seen are from southern Asia. I've seen this done in Middle-Eastern music too, with scales like: K:D=C_E_B^c where the C is different in the two octaves. We really shouldn't exclude these musical styles when it's so easy to include them. We've had inquiries on the list from people who play Persian and Indian classical music. It would be interesting to see how well it works for them. If Jack Campin weren't on vacation, we'd probably hear from him now. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson | | K:A_b^f^c | shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? | | It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. | | So you are saying that | | K:A has 3 sharps | | K:A _b has no sharps and one flat instead? | | This is totally illogical. I can understand K:A _b to mean 3 sharps and | add a b flat but what now is the significance of the A? It's quite logical. K:A has a tonic but no scale information, so we assume major (^f^c^g). K:Amix has a tonic and a mode; the signature is ^f^c. That's a separate key, just like K:Am K:A_B has a tonic and a key signature, which is _B Hm. I assumed in K:A_b that the _b is a modifier to the K:A, so that this is a 3 sharps + 1 flat key signature. I can't have dreamed that up, surely? K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. That one's logical. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 06:26:21PM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson Now I don't really mind having minor keys as they are well established, and maybe even the modes Very tolerant of you ;) Well they're not really needed now, are they? There's no separate notation for them. What, modes ? There's a notation for them, yes. They're needed, yes. In that, it's another of those things that you can do with ABC key signatures that you can't do on paper. Same idea as the explicit accidentals, that you can give the tonic as well as the accidentals. However I had not allowed for the use of abc files as a database. In that case I can see a use for a tonic= or mode description. Ah. That's how we were talking at cross purposes, then. Yes, that's the point of things like that, that you can search a collection of ABC files for them. And that's one of the really huge advantages that ABC has, for my purposes. Perhaps this should have a mention in the spec., if people can currently overlook it ? As I have proposed in another post, how about K:_b^f^c tonic=A ? I'd think the usage that John was clarifying (see the K:E ^G discussion) does the same job rather more neatly without breaking the orginal usage. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:32:51PM +, John Chambers wrote: It's quite logical. K:A has a tonic but no scale information, so we assume major (^f^c^g). K:Amix has a tonic and a mode; the signature is ^f^c. K:A_B has a tonic and a key signature, which is _B K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. This last has the potential to be misunderstood, I think. The key signature would be K:Bb ? Easy to mis-type, or misunderstand. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Richard Robinson writes: | | Of course, such searches are always prone to failure | because people just give the wrong key. It's common to see | K:G for tunes in E minor or A dorian. There's not a lot we | can do about this except try to educate people. | | If I had them locally (the tunes, not the people) it might be worth | considering a single-character key sig as a flag for this might | need changing :-) Well, this might not be all that bad an idea. I've thought that it would be nice if a transcriber could write something like: K:?Adorian This would mean that the transcriber is guessing the key. The software would just ignore the '?', of course, and give ^f as the signature. But it would warn interested readers (humand and software) that the transcriber had some doubt about the accuracy of the key. Implementing this would be easy for most abc software: Just ignore the '?'. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
From: I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 1:34 PM Subject: Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III They are non standard in Western music, but you will find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). My first thing will always be to remove any non standard explicit accidentals, replacing them with inline accidentals and inform the player textwise that he/she is playing an unusual mode/key. Anyway lots of klezmer tunes change mode/key every few bars so the need for non-classical is rather limited IMO. The mode/key/accidental stuff is way too complicated for the average folk player (in the Netherlands anyway - wer'e not so smart you know ;-) Arent To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] Re: ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
John Chambers wrote - Bryan Creer writes: | Talking of which, are there any plans for a procedure for amendments or | extensions to the standard or do we just stick to the implement your favourite idea | and argue about it afterwards system we have now? What a concept! This is a gang of musicians, you know. What are the chances of us ever agreeing to any such thing? That's good because I've implemented tonic= and mode= in Abacus. Next you'll be telling us that Britney Spears is a musician ... Yeah! And she' really is a virgin. Bryan Creer
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
- Original Message - From: John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 3:24 PM Subject: Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III Bernard Hill writes: While it is indeed common practice to omit begin-repeat symbols, this is not a nice thing to do to your readers. I've often found myself hunting for the beginning of a repeat, and thinking Why couldn't the f***ing idiots who did this take the half-second extra to mark the beginning of the repeat with a fat bar and two dots? In my experience, this produces more disasters during rehearsals (and sometimes during inadequately-rehearsed performances) than all other bad notation practices combined. If I had my druthers, I'd put a rule in saying that beginnings of repeated sections *must* be marked properly. *Hear hear !* But of course that's dreaming yet another impossible dream. sigh Arent To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Arent Storm writes: | From: I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | They are non standard in Western music, but you will | find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. | Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). | | My first thing will always be to remove any non standard | explicit accidentals, replacing them with inline accidentals | and inform the player textwise that he/she is playing an unusual | mode/key. Anyway lots of klezmer tunes change mode/key | every few bars so the need for non-classical is rather limited IMO. | The mode/key/accidental stuff is way too complicated for the | average folk player (in the Netherlands anyway - wer'e not | so smart you know ;-) The best comparison I've seen is: Suppose you were to find a piece of music written with two sharps (^f^c), and as you played it, you realized that every G had a sharp added, and it really was in A major. You'd probably be annoyed, right? Now, you can't really claim that the music is wrong, because all the notes are right. But there's something wrong with that key signature. The reason it's wrong is that what a key signature really should do is tell you the accidentals that you need to get the basic scale, and then accidentals are added to notes that are outside the scale. If something is in A major, you really should have ^g in the signature, because that's the normal note in the scale. This is the fundamental argument for non-classical key signatures. A tune in D hejaz (or freygish or Ahavoh Rabboh or whatever) is not G minor, and the F sharps are not altered notes. The basic scale really goes D _E ^F G A _B c d, and so those are the notes that the key signature should give as the starting point. Then notes outside that scale should have accidentals. Key changes are a confounding issue in any case. In our original piece in A major, we might well have a few sections that are in D major or B minor. We could write in key changes, but for short passages, that's silly. So we use accidentals for transient key changes, and change the signature only if a long section is in a different key. The same would probably apply in any musical style. In the case of klezmer music, there's a problem that at least four different scales are in routine use, and key or scale changes are quite frequent. In that case, the common approach would be to throw up your hands at the mess (no matter how nice a tune it is), and just pick a simple key signature. It's the least messy solution. When I went through my klezmer stuff and declassicalized the key signatures, I found that I only wanted a funny key signature in about 1/3 of the tunes. The rest were either in a classical mode (major, minor, mixolydian), or were sufficiently mixed-mode that it didn't matter. But for tunes that really are in a non-classical scale, it can be a lot easier to read the music if the key signature doesn't lie to you. Once you get used to such scales, of course. (And I doubt that the Dutch are any stupider than the rest of us. There are known klezmer musicians in NL ... ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Richard Robinson writes: | On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:32:51PM +, John Chambers wrote: | | K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. | | This last has the potential to be misunderstood, I think. The key | signature would be | K:Bb ? | | Easy to mis-type, or misunderstand. Don't look now, but we already have that problem. I've seen a fair number of abc tunes with key signatures like K:_B or K:^Fm, where the person was obviously confused on this issue. It's too bad that abc copied the traditional confused notation. I suppose the people who do this will eventually figure out why abc programs produce the wrong key signature with their tunes. This confusion is probably not helped by an extension that makes K:Bb and K:_B both legal but with different meanings. But since it's exactly the same sort of confusion that is in conventional music notation, the same sort of learning experience applies to both. Now if there were only a way to make conventional music notation more rational ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:42:32PM +0200, Arent Storm wrote: From: I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] They are non standard in Western music, but you will find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). My first thing will always be to remove any non standard explicit accidentals, replacing them with inline accidentals and inform the player textwise that he/she is playing an unusual mode/key. Anyway lots of klezmer tunes change mode/key every few bars so the need for non-classical is rather limited IMO. The mode/key/accidental stuff is way too complicated for the average folk player (in the Netherlands anyway - wer'e not so smart you know ;-) I remember when I first heard mention that modes could be introduced into the ABC key signature (or maybe it was when I discovered they had been. I don't remember it *that* well). I felt the same about that. Complicated, academic, abstract, who on earth needs it ? But I had a poke around with it, one rainy Sunday afternoon, just to see what happened. And I discovered, to my suprise, that it worked better than what I knew. It was a better description. I could get the key signature I wanted _and_ say what the tonic was, both in one move. So it became worthwhile to understand them; and now, years later, I can even remember whether I mean dorian or mixolydian without having to look them up, though I don't use the others so much. If there are people who use ABC, or are considering using ABC, for music where non-standard signatures are less non-standard, they might make the same discovery. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 07:19:17PM +, John Chambers wrote: Richard Robinson writes: | On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:32:51PM +, John Chambers wrote: | | K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. | | This last has the potential to be misunderstood, I think. The key | signature would be | K:Bb ? | | Easy to mis-type, or misunderstand. Don't look now, but we already have that problem. I've seen a fair number of abc tunes with key signatures like K:_B or K:^Fm, where the person was obviously confused on this issue. It's too bad that abc copied the traditional confused notation. I suppose the people who do this will eventually figure out why abc programs produce the wrong key signature with their tunes. This confusion is probably not helped by an extension that makes K:Bb and K:_B both legal but with different meanings. But since it's exactly the same sort of confusion that is in conventional music notation, the same sort of learning experience applies to both. Yes. A case where the usual recommendation that parsers be liberal in what they read could, given the extension, have unfortunate results. But not if they implement it, of course. Now if there were only a way to make conventional music notation more rational ... Then it would become unconventional notation ? -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:42:32PM +0200, Arent Storm wrote: They are non standard in Western music, but you will find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). My first thing will always be to remove any non standard explicit accidentals, replacing them with inline accidentals and inform the player textwise that he/she is playing an unusual mode/key. Anyway lots of klezmer tunes change mode/key every few bars so the need for non-classical is rather limited IMO. The mode/key/accidental stuff is way too complicated for the average folk player (in the Netherlands anyway - wer'e not so smart you know ;-) I remember when I first heard mention that modes could be introduced into the ABC key signature (or maybe it was when I discovered they had been. I don't remember it *that* well). I felt the same about that. Complicated, academic, abstract, who on earth needs it ? But I had a poke around with it, one rainy Sunday afternoon, just to see what happened. And I discovered, to my suprise, that it worked better than what I knew. It was a better description. I could get the key signature I wanted _and_ say what the tonic was, both in one move. I felt (more or less) the same for the modes part. But they fit in with the regular (classical) key-notation, so I decided to signal the mode-part in MusiCAD (textwise) as I expect very few of my users to dig into the abc and discover the key to be D-dorian instead of C Which *is* musically relevant but *isn't* notationally relevant. So it became worthwhile to understand them; and now, years later, I can even remember whether I mean dorian or mixolydian without having to look them up, though I don't use the others so much. If there are people who use ABC, or are considering using ABC, for music where non-standard signatures are less non-standard, they might make the same discovery. For the church-modes part I agree, the explicit accidental signature will confuse anyone trying to play the music from paper (except for the authors band perhaps) Arent To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 06:07:16PM +, John Chambers wrote: Richard Robinson writes: | | Of course, such searches are always prone to failure | because people just give the wrong key. It's common to see | K:G for tunes in E minor or A dorian. There's not a lot we | can do about this except try to educate people. | | If I had them locally (the tunes, not the people) it might be worth | considering a single-character key sig as a flag for this might | need changing :-) Well, this might not be all that bad an idea. I've thought that it would be nice if a transcriber could write something like: K:?Adorian This would mean that the transcriber is guessing the key. The software would just ignore the '?', of course, and give ^f as the signature. But it would warn interested readers (humand and software) that the transcriber had some doubt about the accuracy of the key. Implementing this would be easy for most abc software: Just ignore the '?'. Yes. There's nothing to prevent K:Adorian % ??? is there ? Though some GUI software may hide it, I suppose, I don't know (I prefer to use a few of them, to avoid textual ?s in searches). But it might be nicer if we could put it/them straight in the fieldvalue and have it ignored. But, if in, say, a T:, it wouldn't want to be ignored to the extent of not getting printed ... -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Richard Robinson wrote: K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. This last has the potential to be misunderstood, I think. The key signature would be K:Bb ? Easy to mis-type, or misunderstand. You will find sevral examples of this in the Village Music Project. Which suggests, of course, that ABC2Win accepts it (horrors!). Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
John Chambers wrote: Richard Robinson writes: | | Of course, such searches are always prone to failure | because people just give the wrong key. It's common to see | K:G for tunes in E minor or A dorian. There's not a lot we | can do about this except try to educate people. | | If I had them locally (the tunes, not the people) it might be worth | considering a single-character key sig as a flag for this might | need changing :-) Well, this might not be all that bad an idea. I've thought that it would be nice if a transcriber could write something like: K:?Adorian This would mean that the transcriber is guessing the key. The software would just ignore the '?', of course, and give ^f as the signature. But it would warn interested readers (humand and software) that the transcriber had some doubt about the accuracy of the key. Implementing this would be easy for most abc software: Just ignore the '?'. Unnecessary. You can already write: K: Adorian %? but nobody does. People who get the mode wrong are mostly not aware of their errors, and don't question their mode decisions as long as it gets the right key signature. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson | See http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/RRTuneBk/gettune/0c54.html | | (And why sharpen the fs in stave 5?) I looked at this, and decided that I don't know the tune. Staff 5, which is in D major, sounds just find. If I play it in D dorian, it also sounds fine. Switching between D hijaz and either D major or D dorian are certainly conventional changes in that part of the world. So what key should it be? Also, A hijaz normally wouldn't have ^f. This doesn't matter in the first section, since there are no f's at all. I wonder about the later sections, though. The first f that appears could be ^f, because of the way the tune works. I'd expect the rest to be =f, though. If they are ^f, I'd expect a different name for the scale. Not that people are always very accurate about such things. Having ^f in an A hijaz scale is really no odder than having an occasional ^g in an A mixolydian scale. It just seems unusual for the ^f to be in the key signature. Or maybe the people who made the recording, who were Turkish gypsies, use the term in an unusual way. Turks usually use hijaz pretty much the same way that Arabs do, but there's the common gypsy style of playing fast and loose with all scales, and bending them around at will. Music should follow our wishes, not the other way around. Not to mention Who cares what you call it? So they could well have used the term because the scale starts A _B ^c d e, and the 6th and 7th are variable. Sorta like classical minor. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] Changelog of ABC 2.0
Dear Abcusers,
Thank you for your feedback. Based on your input (both
on and off-list) I have made the following
modifications to the standard.
-- The debated section on Key sigs reads now as
follows:
By specifying K:none, it is possible to use no key
signature at all.
The key signatures may be modified by adding
accidentals, according to the format K:tonic mode
accidentals. For example, K:D Phr ^f would give a
key signature with two flats and one sharp, which
designates a very common mode in e.g. Klezmer (Ahavoh
Rabboh) and in Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). Likewise,
K:Dmaj =c will give a key signature with f sharp and
c natural. Note that there can be several modifying
accidentals, separated by spaces, each beginning with
an accidental sign ('__', '_', '=', '^' or '^^'),
followed by a letter in lower case.
It is possible to use the format K:tonic exp
accidentals to explicitly define all the accidentals
of a key signature. Thus K:D Phr ^f could also be
notated as K:D exp _b _e ^f, where 'exp' is an
abbreviation of 'explicit'.
Software that does not support explicit key signatures,
should mark the individual notes in the tune with the
accidentals that apply to them.
I hope this solves most problems with the proposed
notation?
-- Moved section on clef specifier up to form it's own
section. Added stafflines specifier for percussion
notation. Added more examples illustrating how to
change the clef.
-- I've done away with the backquotes (`)
-- I added to the section on note lengths:
Note lengths that can't be translated to conventional
staff notation are legal, but should be avoided. Also
gave A3/2 as an example.
-- I added to the meter section:
It is also possible to specify a complex meter, e.g.
M:(2+3+2)/8, to make explicit which beats should be
accented. The parentheses around the numerator are
optional.
The example given will be typeset as:
2 + 3 + 2
8
===
As always, I'd like to read your comments.
You can read the whole file here:
http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/abc/abc2-draft.html
Groeten,
Irwin Oppenheim
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
~~~*
Chazzanut Online:
http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/
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Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Phil Taylor writes: | Richard Robinson wrote: | | K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. | | This last has the potential to be misunderstood, I think. The key | signature would be | K:Bb ? | | Easy to mis-type, or misunderstand. | | You will find sevral examples of this in the Village Music Project. | Which suggests, of course, that ABC2Win accepts it (horrors!). Unless, of course, it accepts it as meaning a key signature of just the _B. In that case, it'll be ahead of the new standard. ;-) Actually, I've seen this sort of thing mostly on some mailing lists (such as irtrad-l) where it slowly becomes clear that there are a fair number of people who read and write abc directly, with no abc software getting in the way. It really is an way to pass tunes from one person to the next. And if your abc isn't standard, well, who cares? As long as the (human) reader can understand it, it has done the job. I'm of mixed mind about this. On the one hand, that's how abc started, and we have no real right to object. On the other hand, I've seen what happened to solfa notation ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Arent Storm wrote: For the church-modes part I agree, the explicit accidental signature will confuse anyone trying to play the music from paper (except for the authors band perhaps) Klezmer musicians all use explicit key sigs, and so do musicologists. In fact, it are only clasically trained musicians that get confused from this notation, because they do not understand how non-western scales are structured. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Phil Taylor writes: | John Chambers wrote: | | K:?Adorian | | Implementing this would be easy for most abc software: Just | ignore the '?'. | | Unnecessary. You can already write: | | K: Adorian %? | | but nobody does. People who get the mode wrong are mostly | not aware of their errors, and don't question their mode decisions | as long as it gets the right key signature. I think you're right. Of course, they'd more likely write K:G in this case. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Changelog of ABC 2.0
I've now also updated the ties and slurs section of http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/abc/abc2-draft.html to give PNG examples of nested slurs. Please have a look to see if you can agree. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Richard Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 05:32:51PM +, John Chambers wrote: It's quite logical. K:A has a tonic but no scale information, so we assume major (^f^c^g). K:Amix has a tonic and a mode; the signature is ^f^c. K:A_B has a tonic and a key signature, which is _B K:_Bhas no tonic, but a signature, which is _B. Maybe it's F or Dm. This last has the potential to be misunderstood, I think. The key signature would be K:Bb ? Easy to mis-type, or misunderstand. The distinction between _B and Bb is the same as between a key signature and an accidental so should be easy for a musician to understand... Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Bernard Hill writes: | My suggestion is that accidentals are in lower case, keys in upper. And | if the key name is missing then C is assumed. | | K:A ^b is F# C# G# and Bb. | K:A =c is F# and G# | K:_b^f is Bb and F# | | K:_b is Bb | K:C _b | K:F | | and the last 3 are equivalent of course. No, the accidentals should be case sensitive. I might not care about this, personally, but I've seen the explanations. When the topic has come up in the past, several people have pointed out that there are musical styles that use different accidentals in two octaves. The examples I've seen are from southern Asia. So how is it notated *as a key signature*? - because that's what we're talking about. I am happy to have accidentals on individual notes but we are talking ks here. I've seen this done in Middle-Eastern music too, with scales like: K:D=C_E_B^c where the C is different in the two octaves. We really shouldn't exclude these musical styles when it's so easy to include them. We've had inquiries on the list from people who play Persian and Indian classical music. It would be interesting to see how well it works for them. Again, what's the ks? Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Arent Storm writes: | From: I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | They are non standard in Western music, but you will | find something like [K:D _b _e ^f] often in e.g. | Klezmer (Ahavoh Rabboh) or Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). | | My first thing will always be to remove any non standard | explicit accidentals, replacing them with inline accidentals | and inform the player textwise that he/she is playing an unusual | mode/key. Anyway lots of klezmer tunes change mode/key | every few bars so the need for non-classical is rather limited IMO. | The mode/key/accidental stuff is way too complicated for the | average folk player (in the Netherlands anyway - wer'e not | so smart you know ;-) The best comparison I've seen is: Suppose you were to find a piece of music written with two sharps (^f^c), and as you played it, you realized that every G had a sharp added, and it really was in A major. You'd probably be annoyed, right? Not particularly. Many editions of Bach have that, we classical musicians are quite used to it. Now, you can't really claim that the music is wrong, because all the notes are right. But there's something wrong with that key signature. The reason it's wrong is that what a key signature really should do is tell you the accidentals that you need to get the basic scale, and then accidentals are added to notes that are outside the scale. If something is in A major, you really should have ^g in the signature, because that's the normal note in the scale. Again, not really. Horn parts in orchestral music never have any key signature, the accidentals are all written in as they occur. This is the fundamental argument for non-classical key signatures. A tune in D hejaz (or freygish or Ahavoh Rabboh or whatever) is not G minor, and the F sharps are not altered notes. The basic scale really goes D _E ^F G A _B c d, and so those are the notes that the key signature should give as the starting point. Then notes outside that scale should have accidentals. The notion of tonic is what I think you are referring to, and that is something that comes out of the actual music as heard, not the notation. However I concede it's a good thing to have in software which searches the K: field for tonics. Key changes are a confounding issue in any case. In our original piece in A major, we might well have a few sections that are in D major or B minor. We could write in key changes, but for short passages, that's silly. So we use accidentals for transient key changes, and change the signature only if a long section is in a different key. The same would probably apply in any musical style. In the case of klezmer music, there's a problem that at least four different scales are in routine use, and key or scale changes are quite frequent. In that case, the common approach would be to throw up your hands at the mess (no matter how nice a tune it is), and just pick a simple key signature. It's the least messy solution. When I went through my klezmer stuff and declassicalized the key signatures, I found that I only wanted a funny key signature in about 1/3 of the tunes. The rest were either in a classical mode (major, minor, mixolydian), or were sufficiently mixed-mode that it didn't matter. But for tunes that really are in a non-classical scale, it can be a lot easier to read the music if the key signature doesn't lie to you. Once you get used to such scales, of course. (And I doubt that the Dutch are any stupider than the rest of us. There are known klezmer musicians in NL ... ;-) So what point are you making about the abc standard? I got a bit lost in that above :-) Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | No, the accidentals should be case sensitive. I might not care about | this, personally, but I've seen the explanations. When the topic has | come up in the past, several people have pointed out that there are | musical styles that use different accidentals in two octaves. The | examples I've seen are from southern Asia. | | So how is it notated *as a key signature*? - because that's what we're | talking about. I am happy to have accidentals on individual notes but we | are talking ks here. | | I've seen this done in Middle-Eastern music too, with scales like: | | K:D=C_E_B^c | | where the C is different in the two octaves. | | We really shouldn't exclude these musical styles when it's so easy to | include them. We've had inquiries on the list from people who play | Persian and Indian classical music. It would be interesting to see | how well it works for them. | | Again, what's the ks? Well, it's real hard to draw in ascii ... The K:D=C_E_B^c example has a natural on the C line (below the staff), flats on the E and B lines, and a sharp on the c line. It might be better to put them in a different order; I just expressed it that way to make the scale clear. Which does remind me that, although there's a conventional order for the accidentals in classical key signatures, there really isn't such an order for others. Some particular musical styles might have a conventional order, but I don't know of them. In recent music books that use non-classical key signatures, there are several orders used. I think they position them so that they look good on the page, whatever that might mean to the editor. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] N-times repeats
I. Oppenheim writes: | I've now also updated the ties and slurs section of | http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/abc/abc2-draft.html | to give PNG examples of nested slurs. | Please have a look to see if you can agree. It's getting to look better and better. One thing I noticed missing: The repeat section doesn't mention the N-times-through notation like |:: ... ::| % Play this three times. |::: ... :::| % Play this four times. I've implemented this in jcabc2ps, and used it in a few tunes. I've found that, although musicians will say that they've never seen this, they invariably know exactly what it means. Of course, when a phrase is played three or more times, you usually do have different endings. This is why many people haven't seen this notation. But it can be very handy when you're just writing a basic version of a tune, and you note that one phrase really is played four times. Some time back we had a somewhat silly discussion of how to combine this with the notation for multiple bars of rest. Somehow, I don't think we need to bother with that in the next version of abc. But thosed who have some time on their hands could dig it out of the archives. I'll see if I can find anything else. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] N-times repeats
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, John Chambers wrote: I. Oppenheim writes: | I've now also updated the ties and slurs section of | http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/abc/abc2-draft.html | to give PNG examples of nested slurs. | Please have a look to see if you can agree. It's getting to look better and better. Thank you! With the help of you all the result will look even better. One thing I noticed missing: The repeat section doesn't mention the N-times-through notation like |:: ... ::| % Play this three times. |::: ... :::| % Play this four times. These are already in the standard: By extension, |:: and ::| mean the start and end of a section that is to be repeated three times, and so on. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 09:58:42PM +0200, Arent Storm wrote: If there are people who use ABC, or are considering using ABC, for music where non-standard signatures are less non-standard, they might make the same discovery. For the church-modes part I agree, the explicit accidental signature will confuse anyone trying to play the music from paper (except for the authors band perhaps) No, not fair. It's there on the paper, it's clear what's meant. It might *suprise* some poeple, if they haven't seen it before, but it's not confusing. Except the business of learning to remember non-standard groupings of notes, but if people want to play music that uses them, why shouldn't it be possible to describe them ? -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:47:27PM +0100, Phil Taylor wrote: John Chambers wrote: that it would be nice if a transcriber could write something like: K:?Adorian This would mean that the transcriber is guessing the key. The software would just ignore the '?', of course, and give ^f as the signature. But it would warn interested readers (humand and software) that the transcriber had some doubt about the accuracy of the key. Implementing this would be easy for most abc software: Just ignore the '?'. Unnecessary. You can already write: K: Adorian %? but nobody does. People who get the mode wrong are mostly not aware of their errors, and don't question their mode decisions as long as it gets the right key signature. True. But what about us pedants who aren't sure they've got it right ? grin -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] BarFly update
A couple of bugs have shown up in the recent BarFly release: Under OS X only, when printing at high magnification part of the tune title gets blanked out. Under some circumstances all versions may hang, displaying an Unknown System Error message which cannot be cancelled. Version 1.41 fixes these. The second bug may involve corruption of the program's preferences file, and if you have experienced this you are advised to trash the BarFly Preferences file before installing the new version. It is located in System:Preferences: in Classic systems in ~/Library/Preferences/ in OS X. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
| In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | The best comparison I've seen is: Suppose you were to find | a piece of music written with two sharps (^f^c), and as you | played it, you realized that every G had a sharp added, and | it really was in A major. You'd probably be annoyed, right? | | Not particularly. Many editions of Bach have that, we classical | musicians are quite used to it. Yeah; that's a variant on the earlier note about him using a dorian keysig for minor. In a couple of his works, I think that he really did do a count of accidentals, and picked a key signature that minimized them. This isn't surprising, since our modern concept of standard key signatures really hadn't stabilized then. | .. Horn parts in orchestral music never have any key | signature, the accidentals are all written in as they occur. Yeah; someone pointed that out recently. To me, this argues for an option telling the software to put the entire keysig into the music. An abc player has to do this in any case. It would be really handy if an abc formatting program like the abc2ps clones could also do this. I can think of several good uses for it. In an orchestral/band arrangement, it could be useful to retarget a part to horns by by changing the transpose= term and asking for no key signatures. Then you could use a single source file for several arrangements for different sets of instruments. | The notion of tonic is what I think you are referring to, and that is | something that comes out of the actual music as heard, not the notation. | However I concede it's a good thing to have in software which searches | the K: field for tonics. Staff notation does tell us that stating the tonic isn't an absolute necessity. But a lot of people seem to like to know it. And it can be nice information to have available when you're trying to put together a set of tunes. | So what point are you making about the abc standard? I got a bit lost in | that above :-) Basically just arguing for a very flexible and general way of writing key sigs. The K:tonicmode approach is quite useful, and probably covers at least 2/3 of the world's music. But the proposed K:tonicmodeaccidentals scheme will handle most of the rest, especially if most of the possible omissions are allowed. (You obviously require the tonic if you have a mode, but the other subsets are all meaningful and useful.) One of the interesting aspects of this was pointed out by someone a while ago; it may have been Jack Campin. This is that, although a lot of musical styles use scales that don't fit our 12-note octave, this turns out to not matter too much. Most kinds of music have adopted European notation. This works because hardly anyone uses scales that have more than 7 notes in an octave. The few that appear to have more are like the classical minor, in that they have different ascending and descending forms. But each of these is at most 7 notes. So you can use the Western 7-note scale with accidentals. You just need to tell people how to tune the scale at the beginning. Most musical styles have standard names for such tunings. So you rarely actually need microtone notation; you just use a conventional scale name to map your scale to the 7 notes (plus accidentals) of the Western staff. In fact, this would be a good use of the mode= term that has been proposed. It would give a standard way to name such scales. Software aimed at these other musical styles could then display this name in the conventional manner. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] N-times repeats
I. Oppenheim writes: | On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, John Chambers wrote: | | |:: ... ::| % Play this three times. | |::: ... :::| % Play this four times. | | These are already in the standard: | | | By extension, |:: and ::| mean the start and end of a | section that is to be repeated three times, and so on. | Hey, you're right. I guess I somehow managed to page past it. Now that I have a keyword, I can find it easily. ;-) Onward ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Changelog of ABC 2.0
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 10:08:13PM +0200, I. Oppenheim wrote:
-- The debated section on Key sigs reads now as
follows:
...
The key signatures may be modified by adding
accidentals, according to the format K:tonic mode
accidentals. For example, K:D Phr ^f would give a
key signature with two flats and one sharp, which
designates a very common mode in e.g. Klezmer (Ahavoh
Rabboh) and in Arabic music (Maqam Hedjaz). Likewise,
K:Dmaj =c will give a key signature with f sharp and
c natural. Note that there can be several modifying
accidentals, separated by spaces, each beginning with
an accidental sign ('__', '_', '=', '^' or '^^'),
followed by a letter in lower case.
What about the cases where notes in different octaves
have different accidentals ? I don't see why notes in the key
signature couldn't take the full normal ABC value, with uppercase
and lowercase and , and ' as necessary, so that somebody could
express a key signature with different accidentals for a note in each
octave right up and down the scale. Why do we have to forbid everything
we can't think of a use for ? Other people have already expressed a wish
for this, John has already said so for anybody that missed it.
It is possible to use the format K:tonic exp
accidentals to explicitly define all the accidentals
of a key signature. Thus K:D Phr ^f could also be
notated as K:D exp _b _e ^f, where 'exp' is an
abbreviation of 'explicit'.
??
Is K:D exp _b _e ^f different from K:D _b _e ^f ?
Where does this come from, has it been mentioned before ?
--
Richard Robinson
The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
John Chambers wrote: Bernard Hill writes: | In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes | No, the accidentals should be case sensitive. I might not care about | this, personally, but I've seen the explanations. When the topic has | come up in the past, several people have pointed out that there are | musical styles that use different accidentals in two octaves. The | examples I've seen are from southern Asia. | | So how is it notated *as a key signature*? - because that's what we're | talking about. I am happy to have accidentals on individual notes but we | are talking ks here. | | I've seen this done in Middle-Eastern music too, with scales like: | | K:D=C_E_B^c | | where the C is different in the two octaves. | | We really shouldn't exclude these musical styles when it's so easy to | include them. We've had inquiries on the list from people who play | Persian and Indian classical music. It would be interesting to see | how well it works for them. | | Again, what's the ks? Well, it's real hard to draw in ascii ... The K:D=C_E_B^c example has a natural on the C line (below the staff), flats on the E and B lines, and a sharp on the c line. It might be better to put them in a different order; I just expressed it that way to make the scale clear. There's a problem here. In conventional notation, sharps and flats in the key signature affect all octaves, unlike accidentals which affect only the octave marked. You are proposing to change that rule, not just for abc but for standard notation too. I think there's a case here for using global accidentals distributed through the music in addition to unconventional key signatures to resolve this. Which does remind me that, although there's a conventional order for the accidentals in classical key signatures, there really isn't such an order for others. Some particular musical styles might have a conventional order, but I don't know of them. In recent music books that use non-classical key signatures, there are several orders used. I think they position them so that they look good on the page, whatever that might mean to the editor. The conclusion we came to the last time that this was discussed is that programs should draw the symbols in the order in which they are given in the abc. That way the order is left up to the user. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Changelog of ABC 2.0
Richard Robinson writes: | What about the cases where notes in different octaves | have different accidentals ? I don't see why notes in the key | signature couldn't take the full normal ABC value, with uppercase | and lowercase and , and ' as necessary, so that somebody could | express a key signature with different accidentals for a note in each | octave right up and down the scale. Why do we have to forbid everything | we can't think of a use for ? Other people have already expressed a wish | for this, John has already said so for anybody that missed it. That's basically what I implemented. Except that I haven't gotten around to debugging leger lines in key signatures. ;-) I wonder if there are actually any musical styles where this would be useful? I don't know of any, but that's not much evidence. What I think is the interesting technical problem with a two-octave key signature is: When you play the them an octave high, you obvious want to shift the keysig, too. How would a player program know to do this? (That oughta set them off and running ... ;-) | Is K:D exp _b _e ^f different from K:D _b _e ^f ? | Where does this come from, has it been mentioned before ? That exp is a new one with me. But we did have a discussion some time back in which several people expressed the desire for a no mode symbol. The discussion then seems to have settled on '*' as the symbol, so you'd say K:D*_B_e^f for example. I didn't see any real need for this, but I actually spent a couple of minutes implementing it. I haven't used it myself, because it's not logically necessary. But it is easy enough to implement. I think that Irwin just made up the exp. It's probably as easy as *. Neither is really necessary. But then, key signatures aren't really necessary, are they? To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
Phil Taylor writes: | John Chambers wrote: | | The K:D=C_E_B^c example has a natural on the C line (below the | staff), flats on the E and B lines, and a sharp on the c line. It | might be better to put them in a different order; I just expressed it | that way to make the scale clear. | | There's a problem here. In conventional notation, sharps and flats | in the key signature affect all octaves, unlike accidentals which | affect only the octave marked. You are proposing to change that | rule, not just for abc but for standard notation too. You're right. That's a rule that isn't always followed in all kinds of music. Others here can supply examples. And even in standard Western music, this rule is sufficiently poorly followed that many editors like to insert advisory accidentals just to make sure that readers won't miss them. This may encourage people to believe that a different rule applies. | Which does remind me that, although there's a conventional order for | the accidentals in classical key signatures, there really isn't such | an order for others. Some particular musical styles might have a | conventional order, but I don't know of them. In recent music books | that use non-classical key signatures, there are several orders used. | I think they position them so that they look good on the page, | whatever that might mean to the editor. | | The conclusion we came to the last time that this was discussed is that | programs should draw the symbols in the order in which they are given in | the abc. That way the order is left up to the user. A very good idea. (That's what I did, of course. ;-) There's a lot to be said for tools that do what you tell them, even if someone else might think you're stupid for doing it that way. Then, if it doesn't work, it's the user's fault, not the fault of the programmer. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Changelog of ABC 2.0
On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Richard Robinson wrote: What about the cases where notes in different octaves have different accidentals ? I personally think that the explicit key signature scheme as it is currently defined in the standard is already quite complex. Making distinction between the octave of the accidentals would be a bridge to far. Why do we have to forbid everything we can't think of a use for ? I could think of a use for it, just as I could think of a use for microtonal notation, gregorian notation, etc. But I think that this are all highly specialized extensions that will have to wait for a following standardization attempt. It is possible to use the format K:tonic exp accidentals to explicitly define all the accidentals of a key signature. Thus K:D Phr ^f could also be notated as K:D exp _b _e ^f, where 'exp' is an abbreviation of 'explicit'. Is K:D exp _b _e ^f different from K:D _b _e ^f ? Where does this come from, has it been mentioned before ? This is my solution to the problems identified in the discussion. K:D exp _b _e ^f explicitly defines a key signature, consisting of _b _e and ^f with D as tonic. K:D _b _e ^f is the equivalent to K:Dmaj _b _e ^f which would modify the D major key signature to ^f ^c _b _e Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III
About rolls in Irish music:
...used more in fiddle or pipe music.
Well it's not known in pipe music. They use a particular form of
embellishment known generically as a doubling and it takes many forms,
which are written out.
Depends on the pipes. They're used a lot for uilleann pipes, but
not for highland pipes. Highland pipers tend to write out every last
gracenote, so there's no need for a roll sign. And for that matter they
don't think of playing rolls. But a reel like the Wind that Shakes the
Barley, which starts:
|{g}A{d}A{e}A{d}B {g}{d}G {g}A2|{g}B{d}B{e}A {g}Bc{g}dB|
could be written (tho my old pipe major would have kittens)
|~A3B AGA2|~B3A BcDB|
It is used at least in Irish music as a general ornamentation mark. I've
come across the notation a.o. in Traditional Irish Music: Karen Tweed's
Irish Choice, Dave Mallinson Publications, 1994.
Thanks. But what does it mean? What would say an autoharp make of it,
say perhaps to make it a tremolo.
It means play any ornamentation here. The exact meaning is unspecified.
Correction: in Irish music, a roll is a specific way of playing
several repeated notes, not a general ornament on a given note. It's
basic to the music, which is why it's part of abc. I'm not at all
surprised rolls aren't in the standard notation texts. Matter of fact,
I'd be surprised if they were.
The rhythmic effect is about the same on all instruments, give or
take a little, but the exact playing depends strongly on the instrument.
Breathnach, in Ceol Rince na hEireann V. 3, gives a table of rolls on the
different notes as played on different instruments. For example, for the
long roll on A, written ~A3, he gives A2 {B}A/{G}A for the pipes and
whistle, ABA for the fiddle, and {AB}A^GA for the accordion. (That's a
B/C button box, by the way; a piano accordion would probably play a G
natural instead of a G sharp. Whatever makes for the easiest fingering.)
To show how instrument-specific they can be, for the long roll on D on the
uilleann pipes---a cran, really---Breathnach gives D(8GDEFGEAD . Three
guesses why we don't want to write these things out in detail!
If you want to know how rolls should sound on playback, check
Henrik's abcmus. They sound fine there.
Autoharp? Hmm... chuckle... Well, that'd take some
experimentation, but I'd start with AAA and work from there. Whatever,
~A3 is *not* played A3 (except as a variation, of course :-).
Cheers,
John Walsh
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[abcusers] Changing !..! to *..* or $..$ or ?..? or...
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Ray Davies wrote: be encouraged but not if it messes up the abc of the original folk users. I vote to change the !--! usage to *--* or some other unused symbol. good. Since breaking backwards compatibility with thousands of tunes is apparently no longer a problem, I vote to change 'A' 'B' 'C'... to 'LA' 'SI' 'DO' ... :-) Later, Guido =8-) -- Guido Gonzato, Ph.D. guido . gonzato at univr . it - Linux System Manager Universita' di Verona (Italy), Facolta' di Scienze MM. FF. NN. Ca' Vignal II, Strada Le Grazie 15, 37134 Verona (Italy) Tel. +39 045 8027990; Fax +39 045 8027928 --- Timeas hominem unius libri To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
