Re: [abcusers] this tune intentionally left blank
| I have some ABC files where I use the notation as a tunographic | database - there is no body, either because I haven't got round | to typing it in or don't intend to. Well, for staff notation, my Tune Finder shouldn't have any probem. It will produce the the title, composer, etc, and no staff. [...] As for sound files, I use abc2midi, which produces a really short file if there's no tune body. That's about all it can do, I suppose. But it doesn't fail. These aren't the most helpful behaviours. The user is left guessing as to why they got an empty staff or silent MIDI file. An explicit notation to say the body was meant to be empty, passed onwards through the pipeline, would reassure them that nothing had gone wrong and give them a better idea of what to do next - i.e. read the ABC source. One place this information might be displayed is in the Tune Finder index itself, in the field that lists the fields present in the tune. - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] this tune intentionally left blank
The problem is how best to say this. There is a list of headers that could contain a code for no notes. This field already uses a double quote to indicate that accompaniment chords are present. I wonder if there's a good single char that could stand for notes, or maybe for no notes? Perhaps '*' (asterisk) could be used for this, as it doesn't seem to have any other use, and it is conventionally used to indicate an explanatory footnote. That sounds pretty good. Maybe I'll try implementing it. I don't think that would be a good idea. IMHO any characters that might still be available should be reserved to signal new, more productive contexts. The no notes context can be easily be indicated by a pseudocomment as long as a standard one be agreed upon. E.g. %% End of tune You're misunderstanding where this notation is meant to appear. The asterisk was something for the Tune Finder to display - it already presents a list of the header fields used in the tune, thos would go in the same place. In my GS MacLennan file on the web there is this tune: X:0 T:Dalnahassaig Z:Jack Campin http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ version 1.0 September 2001 C:Pipe Major George S. McLennan S:Gordon Highlanders Pipe Music Collection volume I B:NLS Mus.D.s.19 R:Strathspey M:C K:Hp % No tune body - index entry which, under John's proposal, would get an entry TZCSBRMK* in the Tune Finder. If John's software can identify bodiless tunes without any special signalling, maybe no ABC notation is needed for it; but it still seems to me that it would be a good idea to signal which tunes are *meant* to be that way, to distinguish bibliographies or works in progress from the results of communication/conversion foulups. A single barline, as Phil suggests, is something that couldn't easily comprise a complete tune body by accident, so it could be used for such a convention if everybody agreed on it. A crypto checksum (something I have been arguing in favour of for years) would also serve the same function - you'd know exactly how much tune there was at the moment when the checksum was generated (which in general would be the time when the tune was made public). - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation
I'd like to propose a variant (to be signaled by a flag, say V:-, in the header) where whitespace within a measure becomes the delimiter for beats. %Example 1 M:2/4 V:- | ab abcd | GROUPING, CONTINUATION and SUBDIVISION The above measure represents a group of 2 eighth-notes, ab, followed a group of 4 sixteenth notes. In this scheme, the dash or minus-sign would represent a continuation of the preceding pitch. That's similar to what Curwen sol-fa does, except that sol-fa uses proportional spacing to provide a visual backup for its implicit coding of note length. You would be better served by having a translator from ABC to that than by inventing a third notation that wasn't quite as good as either of those existing ones. (I'm sure somebody somewhere has invented an ASCII representation for solfa - not much point in a human using it directly, as solfa uses kerning and non-ASCII characters to useful effect, but such a thing might make a better target for a translator). - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] is there an ABC bluegrass archive?
Bernard Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Wil Macaulay [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Not much bluegrass repertoire for baritone recorder, I guess, eh Jack? What's a baritone recorder? I only know Tenor and Bass in that sort of pitch. He means a greatbass in C; mine is a Kung, about 20 years old. There's a picture of me with it on my website, taken at Sandy Bells where Wil saw me playing it. I use it as a sort of wind-powered cello in quiet Scottish sessions. As soon as anybody turns up with an accordion, forget it. I might also take my Romanian cobza along but I haven't got very far with it yet (functionally, it's a miniature acoustic fretless bass guitar but more in-your-face than that suggests). The last time I went to this bluegrass event I took my washboard and a Turkish G clarinet (which I can't play any more). The clarinet worked quite well; used selectively on darker and heavier pieces, playing in the viola range, it doubled the fiddle an octave down, acting as a texture-thickener (musical xanthan gum?). - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Copyright Issues ... Socks and America Bashing
| In fact, if someone wanted to post ABC versions of a few Anglican | hymns, I doubt that anyone would find it off topic. There are some | good melodies in that hymnal. And I'd bet you would stumble across a | few How do I write that in ABC? questions while transcribing them. Not a lot. I've typed a fair few hymns into BarFly (in the usual four-part arrangements). The only missing features I can think of are: - alternate phrases (usually printed in small notes) where the score says what to do when the syllable count varies - automation of the metrical indexing system - ability to handle solfa as a sort of text underlay (it would be nice to generate it automatically, but at present there isn't even any way to write it as text so the staff notation shows it correctly) - semantically correct interaction between parts and voices (when you have a verse and a refrain in a four-part hymn, the verse is one part and the refrain another, each with all its voices; not what BarFly does at present). Quite a few of those Anglican Hymns are older folk melodies with newer words attached. Not very many out of the total. Vaughan Williams was very pleased with himself for managing to get a few folk songs into the English-language hymn canon, and he's probably responsible for the common perception among folkies that this is the usual origin of hymn tunes. It isn't; the Church of Scotland's Church Hymnary (3rd ed) lists only 36 tunes as English Traditional and *one* as Scottish traditional out of 695. Most of the tunes in that book (as with other hymnbooks) were written by known, classically-trained, church organists. Including traditional secular tunes from other countries as well, the total of folk origin is still not much over 10%. Some influential hymn composers (like R.A. Smith) said explicitly that adapting folk tunes was a bad idea because their secular associations were too distracting. : Now... back to those posting from outside the U.S.A. and bashing : the U.S.A... why don't you stick a sock in it? You honestly have : the arrogance to post and post and post, knowingly hurting people's : feelings, while expecting them to feel some sort of collective guilt : and not object to your diatribe. Some of us feel sorry for people still stuck in that insane society and feel they need all the moral support from outside they can get. No way in hell would I want to set foot in the place again, it was bad enough thirty years ago. (Up until that post, I'd assumed the name Cepel meant Christian was French, and if I'd thought about it I'd have guessed he wasn't having much fun living in such a jingoistic madhouse at the moment). - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] On parsers again - Outlook PHP
How many computer users nowadays have ever seen or used a punch card? I have a couple in a box as souvenirs. That 72 is especially bizarre. How many people these days could even tell you where that strange number comes from? But lots of software does it. I used the columns after 72 for sequence numbers so I could use the sorter to put a deck of cards back in order if (when) I dropped them. I wasn't for when YOU dropped them so much as when the computer ops dropped them (and didn't tell you). Particularly BEFORE the run! That was why we put big diagonal lines in felt pen across the tops. I discovered the point of that the hard way when I wrote a program to analyze an undergraduate physics experiment, Cavendish's method for determining the gravitational constant. You set two small lead balls oscillating between two large lead balls; most of the damping is due to air friction but a second-order factor is due to gravity. Most students did it graphically on paper. I decided to do better, found our local numerical analysis guru, got a state-of-the-art algorithm for estimating the parameters of damped harmonic motion, and coded it in Fortran IV for an IBM 1130. Everything hunky-dory except I dropped part of my data deck and inadvertently produced an oscillatory motion with a huge jag in it. My resulting estimate for the strength of gravity made it comparable with the nuclear strong force. No time to book another run after I figured out what happened. The odd thing is, here am I, more than 30 years on, sitting at a Power Mac 9600/200 with 384Mb of memory - whereas the 1130 had 32Kb, I think, and presumably ran at a few thousand instructions per second - but despite having a few gigabytes of software under the table I couldn't do the same analysis now. I couldn't have imagined there'd ever be a computer you couldn't run Fortran on. - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] bye (for now, anyway)
The level of spam here has now gone past my tolerance limit. Okay on broadband via a webmail interface (I was doing that on holiday in Kurdistan, last at the wonderfully slick and professional Saraf internet cafe in Diyarbakir) but I don't have broadband here and some of these spams have been huge. As far as I can see, it isn't a matter of the address database being compromised (by either a public archive or a virus attack on some subscriber's machine) - these spams have been routed through the mailserver itself, so simply inventing a new address as I've done before won't do a thing to reduce the spam volume. I'd like to resubscribe if/when the mailserver gets secured against spammers and HTML/virus abuse (subscriber-only posting and challenge/ response subscription, or something like that). Meanwhile I'm a regular on uk.music.folk so you know where to find me. Is there anything happening on the sourceforge list? From my attempts to find it, it seemed to have the opposite problem - successful security by staggeringly arcane obscurity. cheers - jack - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] GHB ... it gets worse ...
A little dyslexia can get you in a whole lot trouble ... something about drugs, bagpipes and fighting in the UK hmm ...awareness about the dangers of GHB and its analogs- gamma hydroxy butyrate or maybe those who don't have GHB get into fights and get booked on GBH after being exposed to Great Highland Bagpipes, LOL. GHB is also used as a date rape drug - seems to be a particular hazard in Glasgow bars. I can see the potential for a really bad teuchter comes to the big city looking for some action joke... - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] tuplet beaming
[Use a wide window for this, it does make sense in a fixed-width font.] The following is a right mess in Barfly, both on playback and display: X:3 T:Oh Callar Spirlings (variation 4) C:Domenico Corri V:1 V:2 M:3/4 L:1/16 Q:1/4=90 K:D Minor [V:1][L:1/16] A2|(6d^cd`ABc (6dag``fed (6^cde``ABc |(6d^cf`efe (6a^gad'^c'd' f'2 z2 |\ (6c=Bc`ede (6g^fg`c'=bc' d'2 z2|(6d^cd`A=Bc (6dag`fed(6cde``ABc | [V:2][L:1/8] z | [DF]`[DF][DF]`[DF][AEG][A,EG] | [D2F2] z2 z(3G,/A,/=B,/ |\ [C2E2]z2 z (3A,/=B,/^C/| D```[DF] [DF][DF][A,EG]`[A,EG]| % [V:1][L:1/16] A2|(6d^cd`ABc (6dag``fed (6^cde``ABc |(6d^cf`efe (6a^gad'^c'd' f'2 z2 |\ (6bab``d'c'b (6agf``efg (6 fed`^cde |(6dfa``fad' d4 z2 || [V:2][L:1/8] z | D```[DF][DF]`[DF][AEG][A,EG] | [D2F2] z2 z (3G,/A,/=B,/ |\ G,2 A,2 A,,2 | D,2 (6D,,/F,,/A,/D,/A,,/F,,/ D,,|| The only real change I've made to the score (one of a set of harpsichord variations from 1780) is to use two treble staves instead of treble and bass - BarFly doesn't do clef changes in mid-voice. Apart from the weird- looking finish, that doesn't matter. What does matter is what BarFly does to the tuplets. Written as above, they are beamed correctly as Corri wrote them - double beams. But the playback reads them as half the length they should be, and the staff display gets horribly confused about what length the bars in the left-hand voice ought to be and how the voices should align. I think I've asked Phil about this in a different context before, and he said the ABC standard insisted on beaming tuplets with one less beam than the standard practice (i.e. sextuplet semiquavers as here would be beamed as quavers). Obviously I can't hand a score printed that way to a pianist and expect her to make sense of it, and there is simply no workaround to get something that both plays and sounds right without using a pen to add beams. Does any other ABC application beam tuplets in the conventionally expected way? And can we fix the standard to mandate double beams and a correct reading of the note lengths in this situation in future? It can't affect very much music in the existing ABC corpus. Minor bug: the spacer characters between the chords don't work right. - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] tuplet beaming
The code: (6abc``def is (normally) interpreted as 6 notes in the time of 2 notes. I know. It shouldn't be, that's nothing like normal musical practice. Try use a more precise syntax for tuplets, like: (6:4abc``def which stands for 6 notes in the time of 4 notes; or the complete form: (6:4:6abc``def Here are the results of my attempts to get round this. (It's rhythmically more complicated than I thought at first - the sextuplets are really 2+2+2, not 3+3, so it's a three-against- two pattern throughout - I've revised the spacing to reflect that). Taking just the first four bars of the upper voice: X:1 T:Oh Callar Spirlings (var 4) 1st try C:Domenico Corri % display correct; plays at double speed M:3/4 L:1/16 Q:1/4=90 K:D Minor A2|(6d^c`dA`Bc (6da``gf```ed (6^cd`eA`Bc|(6d^c`fe``fe (6a^g`ad'`^c'd' f'2 z2 | (6c=B`ce`de (6g^f`gc'`=bc'd'2 z2 |(6d^c`dA`=Bc (6da``gf```ed (6cd`eA`Bc| X:2 T:Oh Callar Spirlings (var 4) 2nd try C:Domenico Corri M:3/4 L:1/16 % a hack, the rhythm is wrong for a human player % plays at the right speed, but only half the triplet signs display Q:1/4=90 K:D Minor A2|(3d^cd`(3ABc (3dag``(3fed (3^cde``(3ABc|(3d^cf`(3efe (3a^ga`(3d'^c'd' f'2 z2 | (3c=Bc`(3ede (3g^fg`(3c'=bc' d'2z2 |(3d^cd`(3A=Bc (3dag``(3fed (3cde`(3ABc| X:3 T:Oh Callar Spirlings (var 4) 3rd try C:Domenico Corri M:3/4 L:1/16 % display totally messed up, playback wrong, it's not reading (6:4 as (6:4:6 Q:1/4=90 K:D Minor A2|(6:4d^c`dA`Bc (6:4da``gf```ed (6:4^cd`eA`Bc|(6:4d^c`fe``fe (6:4a^g`ad'^c'd' f'2 z2 | (6:4c=B`ce`de (6:4g^f`gc'`=bc' d'2 z2 |(6:4d^c`dA`=Bc (6:4da` gf``ed (6:4cd`eA`Bc| X:4 T:Oh Callar Spirlings (var 4) 4th try C:Domenico Corri M:3/4 L:1/16 % ludicrously verbose and unreadable; display and playback correct Q:1/4=90 K:D Minor A2|(6:4:6d^c`dA`Bc (6:4:6da``gf```ed (6:4:6^cd`eA`Bc|(6:4:6d^c`f`e``fe (6:4:6a^g`ad'^c'd' f'2 z2 | (6:4:6c=B`ce`de (6:4:6g^f`gc'`=bc'd'2 z2 |(6:4:6d^c`d`A =Bc (6:4:6da``gf``ed (6:4:6cd`eA`Bc| X:5 T:Oh Callar Spirlings (var 4) 5th try C:Domenico Corri M:3/4 L:1/16 % working round the verbosity with a macro hack m:s = (6:4:6 Q:1/4=90 K:D Minor A2|sd^c`dA`Bc sda``gfed s^cd`eA`Bc|sd^c`fe``fe sa^g`ad'^c'd' f'2 z2 | sc=B`ce`de sg^f`g`c'`=bc' d'2 z2 |sd^c`dA`=Bc sda``gf``ed scd`eA`Bc| X:6 T:Oh Callar Spirlings (var 4) 6th try C:Domenico Corri M:9/8 % rewrites the original but possibly a better solution in this case L:1/16 Q:3/8=90 K:D Minor A2|d^c`dA`Bc da``gfed ^cd`eA`Bc|d^c`fe``fe a^g`ad'^c'd' f'3 z3 | c=B`ce`de g^f`g`c'`=bc' d'3 z3 |d^c`dA`=Bc da``gf``ed cd`eA`Bc| Who on earth would expect the note lengths in (6abcdef to be different from those in (3abc(3def ? This is just a glaring bug in the standard, no pre-existing notation works that way. : The back-quote character appears on the standard Mac keyboard on the : upper-leftmost key, above the tab - very convenient. The character : does appear to be just ignored [...] : The effect is to allow inclusion of a visual marker where emphasis : might be needed - could be useful. Not so much emphasis as a substitute for a non-breaking space (which can't be done portably, though most character sets have a code for one somewhere). I suggested it because it was the nearest-to-invisible character we had left in ASCII. (The alternative would have been to let people use their native non- breaking space and let conversion utilities sort out the OS and font dependencies - if our experience with line breaks is anything to go by, that would have had John Chambers chewing the carpet). - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] Whew!!! again
|Szfad'af Szfad'af
Szfg=bgf |
[V:2] z2| D4 f'4 A4 | D4 f'4 G4
|
%
[V:1] Szegc'ge Szegc'ge Szfg=bgf |Szegc'ge Szegc'ge
Szga^c'ag |
[V:2] C4 e'4 G4 | C4 e'4 A4
|
%
[V:1] ^P. Szfad'af Szfad'af Szga^c'ag|Szfad'af Szfad'af
Szfad'af |
[V:2] D4 f'4 A4 | D4 f'4 F4
|
%
[V:1] ^F. Szdgbgd Szdfafd Sz^ceace |Szdfafd SzFAdAF y [K:Dm bass]
SzF,A,DA,F,|{^C,}D,4 D,4 D,4 |D,8 |]
[V:2] G4 f'4 e'4 | d'4 D4 y [K:Dm bass] D,4
| D,,4 D,,4 D,,4|D,,8|]
-
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes,
Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro.
-- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please --
