Re: [abcusers] Re: Bryan Creer (?)

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

Hmmm ...  I see conflicting evidence here.  If he's an  academic,  he
should be completely at home with no-holds-barred discussions. Things
like misattribution of quotes, quoting out of  context,  and  blatant
misrepresentation  of  others' ideas are the order of the day in most
of academia, and especially in fields such as archaeology.


Perhaps it's because he's still working on a degree. Students tend to 
be 
somewhat isolated from this kind of academic banter, in my experience at least 
(except, of course, from their thesis advisor and from other students). This is 
partly because potting students is not sporting, and partly because, once they 
get a paying job, they tend to put on weight and slow down, and become easier 
targets.

Even then, it all depends on the context. Take a typical innocent 
everyday academic remark, such as I've carefully considered your position, and 
for reasons A, B, and C, I've decided it has no merit whatsoever. When said in 
conversation in an office in front of a blackboard, it means, I'm skeptical. 
Please convince me you are right, after all. A, B, and C may help. However, 
the 
same statement published in an academic journal means I want to have a 
lifelong 
feud with you.

And then there's email, where the sender thinks of it as a 
conversation, 
and the receiver thinks of it as a publication...

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] how well supported is the overlay operator

[John Walsh]

Richard Robinson writes:

abc2mtex did something with it, didn't it ? But I forget the 
details.


Yes, as a matter of fact, it did.  I was just thinking
that what goes around, comes around, since this is now appearing
once again.  (By the way, there's no worry about backward
compatibility here---not that anyone is worrying about
compatibility with abc2mtex anyway---for it was just a hack to
make multistaff music possible at that time, and it was soon
obsoleted by the V: field.  If more than ten people in the world
ever used it, I'd be surprised.)

Phil Taylor writes:


I see - it's a MusicTex function then, rather than part of 
abc2mtex?


Well...it is and it isn't.  The  is part of musixtex,
and the  is part of abc2mtex, (which of course translates it
into something different in musixtex.)

 It worked the following way:  if one had three voices, say,
then the command  would toggle the voices in turn, i.e.

 notes1  notes 2  notes3

would give the notes in the first voice, the parallel notes in
the second voice, and ditto in the third.  (But an additional 
would *not* send it back to the first voice---that might be ok
for machines, but for humans it's a guaranteed disaster...it
would take no time to get completely lost in the voices.) In
fact, there was another mechanism for that, which was a
start/stop operator, .  With this, the above would actually be
written

 notes1  notes 2  notes3

The second  resets it to the first voice.  Admittedly, when we
talk about voice overlay, we are talking about something slightly
different from the above.  In abc2mtex, the voices were
pre-defined in the header, just as the V: field is now.  I'll
call such voices globally defined.  So abc2mtex used it for
globally-defined voices.  The  operator is now being suggested
instead for what I might call locally-defined voices, or even
implicitly-defined voices, voices which appear suddenly, then
disappear after a couple of bars, without ever being defined by a
V: field. [Of course it's probably used for other purposes,
too...]


I have used this machanism a couple of times with
abc2mtex---but no more often than I absolutely had to. (Tried it,
didn't like it.) The problem is that it is extremely difficult to
proofread and correct. I could find a mistake in the staff
output, but re-finding it in the abc was another problem.  Like
as not, I'd end up correcting the wrong notes. And this was with
only two voices. Once you've used the  character a few times,
it's difficult to sort thru all of them to find the spot that
you're after.

From the number of posts in this thread, it looks as if
this is a good feature, and probably deserves some thought, so
let me make a couple of observations.


From my experience, I'd say that the operative thing here
is ease of proofreading and correcting, even more than ease of
either writing or reading.

For instance, the 2.0 standard says that one should start
the overlay at a barline.  However, this might force one to
extend the segment further than absolutely necessary,
particularly if the barlines are sparse.  The longer the segment,
the harder the proofreading.  I'd suggest adding a start/stop
character, making it possible to start and end in the middle of a
measure, and to continue across barlines.  In abc2mtex, it's
;  abcm2ps suggests ( and ) for that, and uses  for
something else.

I like that, since the pren tells you if it's the start
or end of a segment, and that simplifies finding the critical
place in the abc.

A couple of questions.

If I read the abcm2ps documentation correctly, it's
possible to have two implicitly-defined voices on each staff
(making three voices in all) one gotten with  and the other
with .  (The limitation seems to come from the need to
distinguish voices by note-staff directions.)  Is there any need
for more than this?

The abcm2ps documentation mentions the problem of
distinguishing ( from the beginning of a slur, but is that a
real problem?  Can't one just treat ( as a special case like
(3  for a triplet? If it should be absolutely necessary to have
a slur just before an , then add a space between them: ( .  
(Of course, there remains the question of whether that slur
applies to one voice, or to all.  Hey---that's someone else's
problem.)



Cheers,

John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] ABCp output data structure

[John Walsh]

Paul Rosen writes:

elemskip - arbitrary length string.[What does this do?]


Elemskip is the distance between notes, a real number.  It is used by abc2mtex,
but probably not by any other program.  It's good to have the parser accept an 
arbitrary
string, tho, since if the field is eventually re-cycled, it could be used for something
having only text; then there'd be no backward compatibility problem.

The thing that has always puzzled me about ABC is all the header fields. As
far as I can tell, not all programs treat the headers the same, and some
ignore some of them. Is there a recommended place that each of the header
text fields should go?


Yes---elemskip is a good example---all programs but one ignore it. In the 
header
section, only the X: and K: fields have fixed positions. (Of course, it is important
whether the fields occur in the header or inline.) But the order of the fields is
purposely flexible; makes parsing harder, perhaps, but it cuts down enough on the 
errors
in writing tunes to make that worthwhile, especially to musicians. (!)  This goes for a
number of other features of the language, since it's supposed to be both human-readable
and human-writable, as well as machine-readable.  I gather from the comments I read in
these threads that the result is an uncomfortable cross between computer and human
languages, which might be aggravating when you're the one who has to write the parser. 
 
But then, this is yet another reason that a universal parser would be a boon.

There is one major limitation with the data as expressed above: If the point
of the application using it is to modify the file, then comments, line
breaks, and other details are important so that the file looks as much like
the original as possible. In other words, not only should the structure be a
straightforward description of the music, it should have all the information
that is required to write the tune back out identically. For instance, we
should be able to tell between C and 4/4 in the time signature. One way
to handle comments, spaces, and line breaks is to have a second structure
that contained them and instructions for inserting them back where they need
to be. Many programs would ignore that, a transposing program wouldn't.


A good point.  Since the notation is supposed to be human readable, you want to
keep just about everything in place--it's difficult to know beforehand what small 
changes
will confuse a human reader, or, for that matter, for what purposes the parser will be
used.  Secondly, this is a good test of your parser: if you can replace the tune from 
its
representation in the parser, you know that the parser is complete, i.e. it has all the
information it needs.  (In mathematical terms, the mapping abc --- parsed abc is
invertible.)

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] Indexing tunes

[John Walsh]

Hi,

I didn't realize you wanted to print the incipit in staff notation. Try
running abc2mtex -i file with the index.fmt file below in the same directory.  
It'll set up the incipits as normal abc tunes in the file index. Then run
sort_in on it to sort by title, and print out the result with abcm2ps. (The
backslashes are there to quote characters so that they'll print out literally.)  
There's more that you can do with the format file, by the way---check the file
index.tex in the abc2mtex distribution for some ideas.  However, if you want to
format the output by, for instance, printing the title and incipit on the same
line, that's between you and abcm2ps.

Cheers, 
John Walsh

---snip here
File index.fmt:

\X\:X5
\T\:T55
\M\:M5
\K\:K6
|30


Note: Carriage returns are important.  The \X should be on the first line of
the file.  Follow the |30 by _two_ carriage returns if you want a space
between tunes.  (You have to follow it by one CR in any case.)

-

You wrote:

 
 I tried the instructions below (still looking for an index of 
 incipits--how are you doing Phil ;) ? ).  abc2mtex does indeed give a 
 listing of Title plus the first bit of the tune in ABC.  BUT, it takes 
 things out of the ABC syntax, so the music can not be readily turned 
 into notation.  Perhaps there is an index format that would keep the 
 syntax, but I couldn't muddle it out of the index.tex file .. at least 
 at first reading.
 
 Three thoughts:
 
 1)  The parsing is quick, efficient, and apparently accurate.  If Phil 
 is actually working on this perhaps the code would help him.
 
 2)  Does John, or anyone else, have the index.fmt that might do what I 
 want?
 
 3)  Is there any consideration to adding an incipit format 
 specification to ABC 2.0?  Seems to me it would be most useful..
 
 Chuck Boody
  For abc2mtex, you need a file index.fmt in the directory you
  want  to index.  Put  T40 |30  in the file index.fmt.  To index
  file.abc, type
 
  abc2mtex -i file
  sort_in
 
  at the command line.  Then the list you want should be in the text
  file index in the same directory, sorted by tune title, with the
  first two or so measures given in abc.  There are lots of other ways
  to do this---see the file index.tex in the abc2mtex distribution for
  the definitive explanation. of the whole indexing facility.
 
  It's true as Phil says that abc2mex can be a real pain to set
  up, since you also need TeX, which itself is non-trivial to set up.
  However, that doesn't enter here. The sorting part of abc2mtex works
  without having tex installed---it just writes a text file, and you
  take it from there.  So all you have to do is to compile or download
  abc2mtex and sort_in.
 
  It seems a bit baroque to only use abc2mtex for indexing,
  but on the other hand, I've often found this indexing facility useful.
  Moreover, since the code is freely available, it might give an idea of
  how to add this type of sorting facility to other programs.
 
 
  Cheers,
  John
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[abcusers] spam

[John Walsh]

Hi,

Am I the only one getting lots of spam (apparently) coming thru the
abcusers list?  I haven't heard any other complaints yet, but the score this
morning when I opened my email was two genuine emails, one spam directly sent to
me, and four with headers mentioning abcusers, like this:

From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Aug 29 11:12:22 2004
Received: from argyll.wisemagic.com ([207.136.137.70])
by viol.math.ubc.ca (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i7TICKvE016641
for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sun, 29 Aug 2004 11:12:21 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by argyll.wisemagic.com (Postfix)
id C4BD4683; Sun, 29 Aug 2004 10:35:44 -0700 (PDT)
Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Received: from 1632010.com (unknown [219.137.78.67])
by argyll.wisemagic.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 9091D627
for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sun, 29 Aug 2004 10:35:40 
-0700 (PDT
)
From: =?gb2312?q?_=C1=D6_=BA=A3__ [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: =?gb2312?q?=B9=E3=D6=DD=CA=D0=C8=D9=CC=A9=C3=B3=D2=D7=B9=AB=CB=BE?=
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 02:11:56 +0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=f5496535-61e0-4d36-8958-791751c82382
Message-Id: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Content-Length: 1281

This was a slow but otherwise typical day.  No idea if the spam is
really from the list or if the headers are bogus.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Indexing tunes with ABCMUS

[John Walsh]

I recently read about the ability to index tunes in one or
more abc files using ABCMUS.  Unfortunately, I have been
unable to do so.  Would some kind individual reply (maybe by
private e-mail) with some simple directions about how to
index the tunes contained in a single abc file.  If I can
get one done, multiple files should be easy from that point.


For abcmus, click the file menu, go down to the entry Make
List/Index/etc, click it (or just hit ctrl-shift-L). Go to List Type
in the dialogue box, click to get the pull-down menu, and choose
cheat-sheet.  There are fields in the dialogue box to specify the file
or files you want to index, and the file for the output in. There
should be a T in the Sort field, so it'll sort alphabetically by
title. Fill these in, and click Start.  It'll write a text file with
each title followed by the first couple of measures in abc.

There are some other list types defined, and in addition you
can also define your own type. You can play around with this to get it
just as you want it.  I don't know whether or not you have to register
the program to use this feature, tho.

For abc2mtex, you need a file index.fmt in the directory you
want  to index.  Put  T40 |30  in the file index.fmt.  To index 
file.abc, type 

abc2mtex -i file
sort_in

at the command line.  Then the list you want should be in the text
file index in the same directory, sorted by tune title, with the
first two or so measures given in abc.  There are lots of other ways
to do this---see the file index.tex in the abc2mtex distribution for
the definitive explanation. of the whole indexing facility.

It's true as Phil says that abc2mex can be a real pain to set
up, since you also need TeX, which itself is non-trivial to set up.  
However, that doesn't enter here. The sorting part of abc2mtex works
without having tex installed---it just writes a text file, and you
take it from there.  So all you have to do is to compile or download
abc2mtex and sort_in.

It seems a bit baroque to only use abc2mtex for indexing,
but on the other hand, I've often found this indexing facility useful.  
Moreover, since the code is freely available, it might give an idea of
how to add this type of sorting facility to other programs.


Cheers,
John
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Re: [abcusers] Project for someone or already available?

[John Walsh]

Chuck Boody writes:

I find that I frequently could use an index of an abc file (or set of 
files) that contains title followed by the first few bars (say 2-4).  
This would be invaluable for those situations where everyone remembers 
the title but not how it starts and for other such situations.

 Is there a simply way to do this (on a Mac for me)? 


 Abcmus will do this for Windows boxes---check out its Make
List/Index etc. command under the File menu. It's pretty flexible and
easy to use, so you can do quite a bit with it. The original abc2mtex has
a similar indexing feature, which should work on Macs--the indexing part
of the program should run, even if TeX is not installed.  You can use
this to index anything from one file to your whole abc collection.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] K:none

[John Walsh]

| I believe I decided that T: was a valid title field as well --some 
|pieces simply don't have a title.

Yes; I have a number of examples where I don't want a title.  Mostly
they're musical fragments, or things like a blank manuscript page.


  None none and Gan Ainm are legal titles, (And not only to
John Cage:  the last is by far the most common Irish tune) so
T:none is ambiguous. T: would seem to be a reasonable way to
indicate that a tune doesn't have a title, or that at least that one
doesn't want to print a title above it.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] this tune intentionally left blank

[John Walsh]

The double-spaced ones are a nightmare.  Have you figured out what
sequence of events creates them?


It can happen when a file passes thru both a DOS and Unix
editor.

Cheers,
JW

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Re: [abcusers] smaller notes among others

[John Walsh]

Hi,

Kristian Nørgaard asked:
| Is it possible to write a part of the melody with smaller notes than
| then rest.
| This is often used when you want to show a short melodyline, which 
isn't
| part of the main melodi.
|
| It should show up in the same staff as the rest.



This probably won't do you any good, since it is specific to
abc2mtex, (version 1.6) but working this out made a good excuse to put off
some real work, so here's one way to get small notes using abc2mtex -x.  
The last two bars should appear in small notes.

By the way, this uses the abc2mtex convention that a backslash
beginning a line passes the whole line verbatim directly on to tex.  So
the first line after the K: field just defines two musixtex macros.

Cheers,
John Walsh


X:1
T:Test
M:9/8
K:G
\def\userTu#1{\tinynotesize}\def\userTl#1{\userTu#1}
d|cAG GDG G2 d|cAG GDG F2d|TcAG GDG G2G|TFAd fed cAd||



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Re: [abcusers] Making a book, how?

[John Walsh]

Hi,

This is certainly possible with abc2mtex---I've done it several times,
and it can look quite good.   What do you mean by Can't make them work?
Can you be more specific? Is the problem printing? Previewing? 
Seeing as it's TeX, there are lots of possible problems...

One possibility comes to mind: before running abc2mtex, delete any
*.mx* files which are in the same directory. (These control the final
note-spacing.) For some reason, the program doesn't overwrite them, so if
you have some hanging around from previous tries, when you issue the
command tex music, the program will look at the wrong *.mx* files, and
it'll give you really weird error messages.

Cheers,
John Walsh


I have a collection of ABC tunes that I play frequently and would like
to make a printed format of these in a nice book like format. I am
familure with LaTeX so I thought that abc2mtex might be the way to go,
but cannot make the generated file work. I can run all the musixtex
examples and they come out beautiful, but can't make them work.




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Re: [abcusers] Continuation Lines

[John Walsh]

As I remember, the real problems with the continuation---apart
from the incompatibility of 1.6 and 2.0---come when there was a mixed bag:  
several staves, lyrics, etc.  In that case, there are natural musical
groupings, and there was a discussion on how, or whether, to have smart
continuations which would work on a whole group, or within a group.  A
few ideas were suggested. Barry Say made a fairly far-reaching proposal
for doing this, but I don't think the discussion continued much beyond
that point.

Cheers,
John Walsh 

Steve Bennett writes:

Hi!

I'm in the process of writing Yet Another ABC Parser as part of a larger
project I've been working on for a while.  (There are umpteen jillion
reasons why I'm not using an existing parser - the biggest being this one 
is
written in Objective C, but that's besides the point...)

Ideally I'd like this to be able to handle files which conform to ABC 1.6,
ABC 1.7.6, and the ABC 2.0 draft spec (dated Aug 14, 2003), but there are
numerous little quirks and differences.

The quirk I'm wrestling with today is Continuation Lines, which seems to 
be
the biggest single area (and the biggest can of worms on the list archive)
where the 1.6  1.76 specs seriously conflict with the 2.0 draft spec.
Files written one way will parse ONLY if you use the 1.6/1.7.6 method, and
files written another way will parse ONLY with the 2.0 method.  And I 
don't
see any mechanism (short of a good AI) to figure out which way during the
parse.  So I'm going to implement both and allow the user to decide which 
to
use via a runtime switch.

So...  The 2.0 continuation line specification is almost trivial to
implement.  The only area which could use a bit of clarification there is
it's effect during History fields.  For example:

...
H: This is some history

This continues the history
So does this
And this too %%and this isn't an xcommand
% But is this a comment? If you display
% the history field, is it included?
% I believe the answer should be No...

And what about this? X \
Would this appear on the same line as the X \
If the history was displayed to the user? (IMHO, Yes)

And here's the real challenge: \ % oh boy
O: Is this the Origin or part of the History?

I think it's part of the history myself
And that *this* line is the last line of the history.
O: This is the real origin...
...


Does this interpretation of the ABC 2.0 variant make sense?  Comments 
aren't
actually part of the history field, and continuations *do* apply?


As for the 1.6 and 1.7.6 specifications, regardless of what program X, Y, 
or
Z does, the written spec is awfully vague.  I have several possible
approaches to different elements of this, but the basic concept appears to
be that \ at the end of a line isn't so much a continuation, but a 
don't
break the staff here if you would normally.

Taking that as a given, then \ would only be meaningful on tune body or
lyric lines, and ignored (possibly generating warnings) on other fields.  
It
would not allow putting field-like text inside a History field as 
described
above.  You would also require the w: at the start of the continued 
lyric
line, unlike 2.0 which would require it NOT be there.  Does anyone see
anything I'm missing here?

The question becomes how to deal with comments.  I saw plenty of 
discussion
of whether the \ is ignored if it follows a comment, or whether it's
invalid if it isn't the very last character on the line.  I guess it 
depends
on whether you look for the \ first or the comment first.  Is there any
consensus out there as to which is the proper approach when you are 
parsing
files using pre-2.0 continuations?  (Or should I make *that* a user switch
as well...)

--Steve Bennett


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Re: [abcusers] Ties over alternate endings

[John Walsh]

If in doubt, just make both measures part of the repeat.  But it
seems to me one shouldn't have to do anything fancy here. The tie is in
the measure before the repeat, so it is there before the second repeat,
too, and I'd expect CDEF-|1FGAB:|2FGAA|] to tie both endings.  (Whether or
not it works on a given implementation is another question, of course. So
is the case in which you'd want it to tie one ending, not the other; in
that case, I'd just include both measures in the repeat.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
 
  With abcm2ps, how do I do ties over alternate endings?  If I
  have the following:   X:1 M:4/4 L:1/4 K:C CDEF|1FGAB:|2FGAA |]
  How do I tie the first F with both the second (|1F) AND the
  third (|2F)  F?
 
 I don't think there is any way to specify that in ABC.  But you don't
 need to in this case: restructure the tune as CDEF-|FGA[1B:|[2A |]
 
 It would be better if we allowed the tie to act as a prefix operator
 on the second note:
 
  CDEF|[1 -FGAB:|[2 -FGAA |]
 
 though it would be an adventure either parsing that or deciding what
 to print for it in staff notation.
 
 -
 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
 
 

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Re: [abcusers] abc2mtex newbie problems

[John Walsh]

I think the problem is that you have compiled it for MusicTeX, and
your system only has MusiXTeX installed.  (They are quite 
different---MusicTeX
was the original version, MusiXTeX is the current version, and they handle
the tex code differently.  Abc2mtex can write code for both.)  Try 
compiling
it for MusiXTeX, which you can do by using the -x option.

To do that:  if the file is named test.abc, type on the command 
line

prompt abc2mtex -x test
prompt tex music
prompt musixflx music
prompt tex music

and then look at the resulting file music.dvi with a dvi viewer. 
(You don't really need to do the last two passes for
this example, but you will in general.  See the MusiXTeX users manual for 
the explanation.  Oh, yes---if you're going to make changes and 
re-compile, better also do

prompt rm *.mx.*

sometime before, or else you'll get some truly confusing warning 
messages!).


 =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Atte_Andr=E9_Jensen?= writes:

Ok, that makes sense. Now musixtex eats a bit more, but then chokes:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] abc2mtex]$ musixtex music.tex
This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.4.5)
(./music.tex (/usr/share/texmf/tex/musixtex/abc2mtex/header.tex
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/musixtex/base/musixtex.tex
MusiXTeX(c) T.112 3 Jan. 2003
))
** Test 
***
! Undefined control sequence.
l.17 \normal
 \elemskip=8.5pt%
?

Seems that something fundamental is broken, right? One clue could be to 
figure out why the ifs in header.tex go wrong. My knowledge of tex is 
virtually nonexisting, but based on the following (from header.tex)

\if Y\abcmusix% MusiXTeX version

it seems that there's some variable by the name of \abcmusix that should 
have been true, but isn't set.


Yep, the variable is indeed \abcmusix.  As an experiment, you
could try just changing \def\abcmusix{N} to \def\abcmusix{Y} in music.tex.  
You'll still have to fight thru a couple warnings since the code for the
two is slightly different: \elemskip is in MusicTeX but not in
MusiXTeX---just hit return when this warning comes up---and MusicTeX
\include's some files that aren't in MusiXTeX, tho I think you said you'd
removed those calls. But it's easier to simply rerun abc2mtex with the -x
option.

Anyways I'm not sure this is even the right list to go on with this, but 
I'd like to know three things:

1) does the print quality of musixtex make it worth persuing?


Yes, definitely, particularly MusiXTeX, which does a good job of
automatic line-breaking and adjusting the note-spacing in the output. It's
fussier than most other abc tools, but it will do things the others can't.

2) how maintained/unmaintained and used/unused is musixtex anyways?


A very good quesion.  It had been continuously developed until
last year, when Daniel Taupin, the main developer, died tragically in a
climbing accident.  Others were involved in the development, but I don't
know if anyone else has stepped forward to continue.  It's still used,
tho.  There are some extensions, like musixlyr, and front-ends and
preprocessors like PMX that make the code easier to write.  (As does
abc2mtex, for that matter.)

3) where do I go for more info (including installation instructions and 
a community) if I decide to dig deeper into musixtex?

The MusiXTeX user manual is a pretty good start.  It mentions a
list, about which I know nothing :-( Tex, of course, has an active
community, and email lists which offer plenty of help.


Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] abcm2ps questions

[John Walsh]

 Certainly, A4 seems more-or-less standard in Britain. I have the
 impression it is for (at least a lot of) Europe.

I think either default is reasonable. Not that it's important, the question
to me is did Guido change the default? I've only picked up binaries from
there and have no recollection of attempting my own compilation.


I admittedly haven't thought about this, but offhand, it seems to
me that it would be useful to identify country-dependendent parameters.
Clearly, paper size is one---A4 seems standard in Western Europe, letter
size in US and Canada (but what about former Eastern-block countries, and
what about Mexico and South and Central America?)  There are probably a
few other locality-dependent parameters (such as ABC versus do-re-me in
key sigs, and H as fermata vs. musical pun on Bach's name) which would be
worthwhile to identify--then they could be put front-and-center in the
parameter file with clear directions on how-to.

Another question to me (at least from my biased UK view point) is why do the
US have to be so akward? I'm sure life would much easier for all if they
adopted the metric system, ISO stds for paper, etc.


Oh, oh, oh...I love it!  But...you could also ask: why don't the
Pommies still use the English system?  (By the way, there's an amusing
history behind the fact that Canada uses the metric system, and America
uses the English system.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout

[John Walsh]

Rather than the typical home row of a 
keyboard, asdfghjkl, we could have something like abcd~:efg|, the row above 
the home row could be ABCD[]EFG...  or something like that.  

If you want to get fancy, you could set up a bunch of key mappings,
one for each key (you can name them G, ADor, DMix, etc.) so that the middle
row (asdfg) is do re mi...  in whatever key you're in (e.g. in D,
asdfghjkl would map to DEFGABcde---well, the F and c are sharp, but that's
taken care of by the keysig in abc) with the upper (qwerty) row giving do re
mi in the second octave, the lower row the octave below.  This lays the
keyboard out like an organ. And, while you're at it, why not make it sound
the note as you type it? Then you can type by ear.

Cheers,

John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Multivoice in ABC 2.0

[John Walsh]

Barry Say wrote:

 I appreciate precisely what you are saying, but it seems to me we are 
 complicating matters. Meter changes will generally be global and in 
 that case we can write the input for all voices for the first part of 
 the tune which is in the initial meter.
 Follow this by an M: field
 Then continue with the input for all voices for the section in the 
 new meter. If we need to change the meter for one voice then this can 
 be done with an inline field 
 

OK, let's see if I understand this. (It's always easier to ask a
question than to read text carefully): a specification or a change in
meter/key/whatever will apply to all voices, *unless explicitly changed*
by an (inline?) specification. But the inline specification applies *only*
to the one voice.  So there is a fundamental difference between inline
changes (presumably enclosed in square brackets) and (what do you call
non-inline changes? Outline?) those specified by a field starting on a
newline (which can not be enclosed in square brackets, or else the email
linebreak demon will foil the best intentions), in that the inline changes
are local, the outline (sorry! I'd better use quotes on that!) are global.  

So, the order of voices in the abc is usually not important,
*except* in the case of an outline change, which will presumably apply
to all subsequent voices, as written in the abc.  Or am I confusing
things?

 
 I include a section from my suggested modifications to the ABC-
 standard at http://www.nspipes.co.uk/barry/abc2propos2.html
 

I couldn't find that---got the earlier version, but not
the second.

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] suggested modifications to the ABC standard

[John Walsh]

Stephen Kellett writes: 

John Walsh writes: 

(My own impression is that using white space as a delimiter 
probably works better for machines than humans---and I think 
I helped prove that 
 

I think you got that the wrong way around? I can give well known (in
computing circles) examples of where whitespace has been used as
delimiters and it has caused lots of problems. 


Wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last.  But I was thinking
of the infamous white-space-delimiter-just-before-linebreak which
computers can see, but which causes many humans to make oversights which
are sometimes caught before said human throws the monitor thru the window,
sometimes not.  Possibly we're both right on this?

Just so I can feel I'm contributing something, let me suggest one
possibility: 
  
Use the next-to-last character on the line above for the delimiter
for header tags...

Cheers,
 
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] suggested modifications to the ABC standard

[John Walsh]

Stephen Kellett writes:

I think there is a problem with the approach outline below by John 
Walsh.

In many places you are taking an already existing tag (for want of a 
better word), such as X: or T: or t:, whatever and adding overrides with 
no prefix to indicate it is an override. For example, the CAPTION 
override for the T: field which currently indicates a text field 
describing the tune title.


I just wanted to make the point that the field-based approach made
some extensions quite easy, and to show how the field/tag idea would be
useful, so I followed Barry's suggested syntax---he'd suggested spaces as
delimiters.  Whether that's a good idea is another question, of course.  
(My own impression is that that using white space as a delimiter probably
works better for machines than humans---and I think I helped prove that by
getting it wrong in my example!  But that can be decided later.)

I also didn't address Richard Robinson's concern that the tags are
so easy to create that there's a risk of uncontrolled population growth.  
That's certainly a legitimate worry.

In abcm2ps (and maybe in other applications too) this is already 
possible to a lesser extent. You can embed text in an abc file. Of 
course, this solution is abc-centric. The text formatting options are 
rather limited. You can set font face and size, etc. but no hyphenation, 
justification, and other fancy stuff.


I was thinking of doing something which might see print; I know
TeX does that, but I wasn't sure how well abcm2ps would handle it.
   
Actually, it is possible in abc2mtex too, at the price of
beginning each line with a backslash.  But that's an editing nightmare.  
(Oops...shouldn't have reformatted that paragraph---now all the
backslashes are in the middle of lines!) Having to type just one field
header seems to be a great advantage.

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] suggested modifications to the ABC standard

[John Walsh]

I've been looking over Barry Say's proposal, and it seems to me
that it fits in well with the existing abc, and opens up a couple of new
possibilities.  As an example, it strikes me that one could be ambitious
with the text (t:) field, and use it to construct documents which mix
staff-music and text.  In particular, one could embed little staff-music
illustrations in a text document.  This might be useful.  (Of course
something like this would probably be impractical to implement in most
applications---which would ignore it---but in some, such as abc2mtex, it
would be a piece of cake: so easy that it would be a pity not to do it.)

The idea is thisI'll illustrate it with abc2mtex: if there is
a printable text field, then abc2mtex would simply pass it on verbatim to
TeX.  TeX would then process it for printing as usual, until it hit
another field.  When it hit the first X: header, abc2mtex would start
processing music.  (This even works if a line starts with a backslash,
since abc2mtex would pass it on in any case.)  When it reaches the next
printable text field, it returns to text mode, and so on.

Since the t: field is designed for general information, usually
unprinted, one could add a keyword, e.g. t: PRINT to indicate that the
field is to be printed.  One should be able to print extracts---one or two
bars---as well as whole tunes.  Extracts would have to be processed a bit
differently from tunes, so perhaps one would want to add a keyword to the
X: field: say X: EXTRACT, to indicate this.  Since captions might be more
important than titles, one could have, say, T: CAPTION text for that.

And so on. One application would be to tune books with text
between the tunes.  Another is to articles---or theses, for that
matter--on music, illustrated by short extracts, e.g. on Dock Boggs
accompanyment of 'Oh Death', or Seamus Ennis' variations on the D cran,
or Beethoven's modulations from C# minor to D Mixolydian (if he ever did
that.)  Of course this is already possible: use an abc application to to
produce .tex or .ps files, do some hand-editing to get them in the right
form, write and format the captions, and import it all into a word
processor after converting it into whatever the word processor can handle.  
But that's work. It'd be nicer to do it all in one go.

Just a possibility---after all, why shouldn't abc take over
the world?

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] ABC 2.0 avoiding line breaks

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

The real problem we're facing is:  A lot of people  really  want  the
final  backslash  to  mean  continue  with the next line of the same
type.
   [...]
This problem is fundamentally hopeless, because  musical  terminology
and  understanding  is so varied.  Unless we can come up with a truly
unambiguous definition of same type lines, we don't stand a  chance
of making this work consistently. And given the wide differences here
in how people understand musical terms, we just aren't  going  to  do
anything like that.



This one depends on how you view the problem.  If you think of
continuing one line to a specified line below, you're right, it is indeed
difficult.  But if you think of continuing groups of lines it is easier.  
In the examples we've seen---certainly all those I was thinking of---there
were groups of music/lyrics/voices which would be played simultaneously,
and which, in staff notation, would all be broken or continued together.  
And indeed, I think that the programs already know how to do the
breaking/continuing. For if it breaks the staff, the program has to figure
out how to write the next staff or group of staves.  If it continues the
line, it does just the same, except it writes them on the same line, not a
new line.  All the info it needs should already be in the headers, where
the voices are defined.  (Ok, there may be some auxiliary lines---didn't I
see something about a decorations line in the standard?--but the program
will have figured that out, too.)


I can imagine some pitfalls: what if a voice drops out or comes
in? What if one of the lines in the groups needs to be continued
separately, within the group continuation? Perhaps one needs a way to do
that as well as continuing the entire group.  We probably have to see a
bunch of examples to know.

On John's suggestion of \3 to skip three lines: well, the
worst-case is probably a conductor's score for an oratorio---full
orchestra and chorus scores, all together.  (Maybe not a realistic aim of
abc, but we might as well keep it in mind.) I wouldn't trust myself to
count lines for that!  But the \x notation is something to keep in mind
in case we do need more than one variant on the continuation.

Anyway, it seems to me that it's as much a musical problem as a
programming problem---and, as John pointed out in a previous post, it
helps that the developers are musicians...

Cheers,
John Walsh




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Re: [abcusers] ABC 2.0 avoiding line breaks

[John Walsh]

I think Barry was diplomatically suggesting that the continuation
rule proposed in the draft standard needs some re-thinking.  The proposed
solutions are considerably less readable than the original, so he may have
a point.  This kind of thing has to be done all the time, and should Just
Work (TM).  It should take a single---well, maybe a couple---of
well-placed backslashes added to what he wrote to do the job.  In any
case, it shouldn't require a drastic re-write of the abc.  Barry suggested
earlier that something like

X:1
T:canzonetta
M:none 
L:1/4
Q:1/2=120
K:FDorian
[V: 1] |:z4  |z4  |f2ec |_ddcc|\
[V: 2] |:c2BG|AAGc|(F/G/A/B/)c=A|B2AA |
[V: 3] |:z4  |f2ec|_ddcf|(B/c/_d/e/)ff|
% 5 - 9
[V: 1] cAB2 |cAAA |c3B|G2 HGz ::e4|\
[V: 2] AAG2 |AFFF |A3F|=E2 HEz::c4|
[V: 3] (ag/f/e2)|A_ddd|A3B|c2 Hcz ::A4|
% 10 - 15
[V: 1] f_dec |B2c2|zAGF  |=EFG2  |1 F2z2:|2 F8|]
[V: 2] ABGA  |G2AA|GF=EF |(GF3/2=E//D//E)|1 F2z2:|2 F8|]
[V: 3] _dBcd|e2AF|=EFc_d|c4 |1 F2z2:|2 F8|]


should work--i.e. just the one backslash for the first line of the obvious
group.  Or perhaps one should add backslashes to the first three lines.  
(I don't see why both shouldn't work, but there are probably complicating
factors.) The point is that one doesn't want to give up the alignment
simply to continue things.  The abc should remain readable. So there ought
be a way to group parts to be continued/broken together. (It's obvious in
this example---it might be less obvious in others.)

For another example, consider

X:3
T:TTLS
M:4/4
L:1/4
K:G
   GG   dd |\
W:Twin-kle twin-kle
   eed2|\
W:lit-tle   star

and so forth.  Supose I want to write out the whole song, putting a
continuation on each line in order to have the program to do the line
breaking by itself.  For legibility, I'd like the words directly under the
music.  But under the proposed standard, I think I'd have to put all the
music first, then all the words.  (Right?) That loses the alignment.  I
think most people reading the above would assume that the backslash worked
for both the words and the music at the same time, and have no trouble.
So it ought to be workable for machines too.

Of course the existing standard, which was written when
abc only had one-staff capability, doesn't address this.  
It needs some thought.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] backslashes

[John Walsh]

Irwin Oppenheim writes:

 Thus neither of the following will work:

 abc def| gab CDE| % comments\
 FGA BC| ...


 abc def| gab CDE|\ % comments
 FGA BC| ...

Correct. %-Comments may not appear on a continued
line. However, you can use inline comments instead:

abc def| gab CDE| [N: comments] \
FGA BC| ...


Ah! Didn't read that far.  I assumed that comments would Just
Work.  As I think they should.  The given solution is logically correct,
but not user-friendly. It deals with picky exceptions.  I think it's
better to count on the software remembering these exceptions than the
user.  The rule count comments as white space would do the job, I think,
and then the comments would always work.

Cheers,

John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] ABC 2.0 Compatibility with ABC2MTEX

[John Walsh]

 
  So there are two examples of people who use abc2mtex for
  typesetting.
 
 But why not use Lilypond, which can do anything that
 abc2mtex could do and more?
 
Because I'm using abc2mtex and have no intention of changing. I
have a book in print which occasionally goes...but why am I explaining
this? Why should I have to learn a new program when I have a perfectly
good one I know how to use?

I may take a look at lilypond if I can ever get it installed.
(Last time, after downloading for a couple of hours thru a modem
connection, I read the fine print at the end of the installation advice
that one should become administrator before installing it, since the
installation didn't work for windows 2000 otherwise. Figures.)

  There is even a *possible* project to bring it at
  least partially up to date.
 
 Why not spend that energy to join forces with Laura to
 make the ABC import of lilypond better?
 

If I do migrate to lilypond, I'll certainly be lobbying
Laura for a number of things.  But that's in the future, and doesn't 
justify breaking backward compatibility now.

Cheers,
John
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Re: [abcusers] Page break formatting

[John Walsh]

 
 I've been asked recently by several BarFly users to support %%newpage
 (or something similar) to force a page break when printing.  Thinking
 about this I find there's a problem with implementing it (and similar
 directives which are placed between the tunes in a file).  BarFly can
 print any selected subset of tunes from a file, and you also have some
 control over the order of printing.  Under these circumstances, %%
 directives which are not attached to any tune (but between a pair of
 tunes) are ambiguous.
 
 I think, therefore, that I can only support them if they are placed
 immediately adjacent to the tune to which they apply - either immediately
 before the X:, or at the end of the tune before the blank line which
 indicates its end.
 
 Comments?
 
 Phil Taylor
 

Two other possibilities come to mind: either only accept them if
the whole file is being printed, or only if they come between two tunes
which have been selected for printing.  (The canny user, after all, can
edit the file or copy the portion to another file. Or check the box (which
you'll add) Ignore pagebreaks.  Or are you worried about person A
putting in the pagebreaks, and person B printing out something received
from JC's tunefinder, and not having any idea why all these pagebreaks are
appearing?


Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] ABC 2.0 Compatibility with ABC2MTEX

[John Walsh]

Richard Robinson wrote, in response to a post of Barry Say:

I particularly notice the comment in Irwin's abc-drafts, that Chris's
original abc examples will need to be edited to conform to the standard.

In fact, abc as it is currently being written is increasingly unlikely
to go thrugh abc2mtex, and abc written for that is not likely to go
through anything written to conform to this draft.


Ouch!  I was assuming he was talking about the use of +...+ for
chords and s...s for slurs.  I think all this old notation should be
documented in the standard, and I'd hope that one or two popular
applications would continue to be able to handle it---pity if all that
music should become unreadable and unplayable---it was, after all, the
standard for a few years.

I trust that the rest of the notation---all of it---will continue
to be supported. This, after all, is the great majority of music for which
abc is used. Abc works just fine for that.  It needs no extension.  It
simply needs to not be screwed up.  There's no point in sacrificing *any*
part of that for new extensions.  My own personal collection is set up for
printing by abc2mtex.  When I send tunes out to musicians and other
friends, I usually remember to strip the texisms out, but not always.  
I'd be extremely upset to start getting reports from friends that they
were unable to handle my tunes, so that I'd have to tell them to scrap
that new-fangled piece of junk they were using to process their abc's, and
go back to the pre-2004 version.

But I don't think that'll happen...except by inadvertence...

Another thought. I suspect several of the people here will never have
used abc2mtex, or TeX, and won't see the point unless you show some
examples of what you're doing with it that no other app. can do instead.


Fair enough. I can't speak for Barry Say---you were responding to
his post---except that I know he has used abc2mtex over a period of time
to produce some tune books for the Northumbrian smallpipes, including some
in a small format to fit pipe cases.  I believe he uses it for the quality
of output---these are publications, after all.

In my case, I've used abc and abc2mtex 1.5 to produce a book of
tunes set for the uilleann pipes---Pipe Friendly Tunes, by name, 520
tunes, 203 pages, published by the Irish Pipers Club.  It was entirely
written with abc and TeX/MusiXTeX, except for the cover art and some
decorative filler pages.  (See the Pipers Club or NPU web sites.)

There are two reasons I used abc2mtex: quality, and macros. It
produces publication-quality output, as has been said before. Barry Say's
books and mine are proof of that. Secondly, with the abc2mtex macro
facility, I can do a lot of things that aren't (yet) a part of abc, such
as various articulation marks special to piping, etc. (Actually, I didn't
need that many for the book itself, which has pretty generic settings, but
I do need them for some more detailed transcriptions that I occasionally
do for Iris na bPiobairi, and for my own use.) The result is that when I
need some particular notation, I can write a TeX macro to represent it,
and alias it to one of the letters H--Z. This is extremely useful; it not
only predates the U: field by years, but extends its functionality. I hope
that I'll eventually be able to do the same thing with other programs---I
understand abcm2ps will allow one to write postscript code for
decorations, but I don't think it has quite the flexibility of the
abc2mtex macros yet.

So there are two examples of people who use abc2mtex for
typesetting. I'm sure there are more. And of course, once one's spent
the time to learn how to use a program, one tends to keep on using it,
so that abc2mtex will probably continue to be used. There is even a
*possible* project to bring it at least partially up to date. 

Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] backslashes

[John Walsh]

There one use of the backslash I couldn't find in the new draft.  
It is used by abc2mtex to put tex code directly into the output file; see
paragraph 2.3.4 of the 1.6.1 docs.  If the first character of a line is a
backslash, then abc2mtex simply passes the entire line along to tex. I've
found it useful: more than half the tunes in my private collection use it.  
It might be useful for other programs too, and in any case, programs
should know enough to ignore the entire line when they encounter
it---which is what they all do now.

So the standard should have an entry something like:

A line beginning with a backslash is used by some programs to pass
information directly to the printing program: the entire line is passed.
This is legal anywhere but in the tune headers. Programs not implementing
this should ignore any line which begins with a backslash.

I think there's a slight wording problem with the use of the
backslash for continuation: we have

A '%' symbol will cause the remainder of any input line to be ignored.

and we also have 

If the last (non-space) character on a line is a backslash (\), the next
line should be appended to the current one, overwriting the backslash and
anything that follows it, to make one long logical line.

(I presume that anything that follows it refers to spaces.)  
Thus neither of the following will work:

abc def| gab CDE| % comments\
FGA BC| ...

abc def| gab CDE|\ % comments
FGA BC| ...

since the backslash will be ignored in the first example, and it isn't the
final non-space character on the line in the second. You probably want to
treat comments as white space.

Cheers,
John Walsh



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Re: [abcusers] abcm2ps and 'extras'

[John Walsh]

Chris Meyers writes:

The one thing I'm missing is putting the slashes on the stems of the
notes. Obviously, an extension to the code is necessary, and I'm even
willing to gasp step outside the bounds of the emerging abc standard
to accomplish my goal, since my real intention is only in creating
pretty postscript output,  


There are two solutions here. The first is, as has been suggested, include
these as decorations e.g. !roll-types!; that could be added into the
standard right now. Then alias them with one of the letters H--Z for use
in the abc itself.  This might be generally useful, since I gather that
these also occur as tremolo markers in string music.

A more elegant solution, which is bound to be done...manana...is
to develop an abc percussion notation, starting from the beginning. This
might be possible, because some presently-used abc notation will be freed
in a percussion clef. The problem, of course, is that it requires someone
who *really* knows about percussion to do this.  Any candidates? (Vicious
circle: Drummers don't use abc because abc doesn't cater to drummers
because drummers don't use...)

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III

[John Walsh]

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


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Re: [abcusers] ABC Standard 2.0 revision III

[John Walsh]

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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Re: [abcusers] asterisks (and obelisks :-)

[John Walsh]

Arent Storm writes:
 
 I have quite a few danish tunes fron at least 1999
 disabling abc-'linebreaks' this way and end with a double **
 What's the use of  **
 

Left over from abc2mtex: it was for the last bar of the tune, to
end it with a right-justified double bar without starting a new staff.  I
think it was dropped in the final version of abc2mtex.

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] Version 2.0.0 voice overlay and lyrics

[John Walsh]

Phil Taylor wrote:
(of the  operator)
 
 My take on it is that the  operator sets the time point
 of the music back to the previous bar line, and the notes
 which follow it form a temporary voice in parallel with
 the preceding one.  I suspect that this should only be used
 to add one complete bar's worth of music for each .
 

With this limitation, it seems reasonable.  It's in abc2mtex,
without that limitation, for writing multiple-staff music.  I used it
exactly once, on something quite simple, and the abc quickly became
unreadable, and, worse, nearly un-editable.  But...it *did* do what I
wanted.

 It seems like a good idea to me provided that we don't get
 carried away.  In MusicXML there is a similar construct,
 with the addition that you can switch staves as you set the
 time point back, and the Dolet plugins for Finale and
 Sibelius use this extensively for e.g. Piano music.  Every
 bar contains all of the parts, right and left hand, bass
 and treble clef.  It's an absolute nightmare!
 

This pretty well matches my experience.  I concluded that if I
were to use this any more, I'd need a pre-processor of some sort... So if
we want to preserve human-readability and use the  in any complicated
way, it might be worthwhile discussing alternatives.

Cheers,
John Walsh 


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Re: Subject: Re: [abcusers] About the choice of '!'

[John Walsh]

Wow!  Go away for two hours and I'm 20 emails behind and the
subject I was thinking about has changed. (Probably a good thing, keeps me
from sending some better-not-sent posts.)  Are all of you folks sitting
anxiously by your computers with your email opened???

But could I ask people to be sparing with the material quoted?  
That usually isn't a problem, but with the present volume, it takes quite
a bit of time to go thru quoted and re-quoted material, and anything which
would pare down that task would be appreciated.  Apologies for taking your
time on this.

On the subject of bangs and stars for linebreaks and
decorations...I haven't been following it closely, and now I admit to
being a bit puzzled as to the status of what's being decided. It
seems to me that using ! for both a hard linebreak and for ! ... ! in the
same tune is asking for trouble.  Using spaces to help distinguish them
(did I see that suggested?) will lead to really frustrated users who can't
understand why abc refuses to behave as they expect---and who, after they
find out that it's just a missing or extra [EMAIL PROTECTED] space (dialect of cartoon
language there, not abc) will re-invent Phil's unix post on the spot.

The other thing that makes this question a bit hard to decide is
that the linbreak usage is pretty much limited to abc2win, while the other
usage is so recent that not too many people even know about it yet.  I
personally like ! ... ! as is, because my intuition is that the ! ... !
usage will be considerably more important in the long run, but of course,
that remains to be seen.

What about deciding what we actually want---whatever will make the
best abc---as opposed to what we think we are forced to accept? There
could be an abc2win compatibility mode---where ! is always a hard
linebreak---and some well-placed warnings to the effect that There is an
ambiguous use of !.  You may want to try abc2win compatibility mode.

And maybe, just maybe, if someone convinces Chris to downplay
abc2win on his site, the problem will get less acute with time.

(Or Jum Vint will update abc2win.  But that is really too much to ask.  I
am reminded of a sig I saw somewhere: Programming is like sex: make one
mistake and you end up supporting it for life.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] multivoice linecontinuation

[John Walsh]

 It was the original syntax, wasn't it ? It worked before the inline
 field [M:...] syntax was introduced, so there may be a lot of older
 tunes out there that have it.

There *may* be,  but are there?
I haven't seen any...


Yes, there are.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] abc2win vs. ABC...

[John Walsh]

Frank Nordberg writes:

Well, since I'm to blame for transcribing one of those books into ABC: 
abc2ps *did* in fact have some serious problems with some of the O'Neill 
1001 tunes. I don't remember the details, though. Might have been some 
generic ABC problems, not related to abc2ps at all.

I did a number of tunes from the 1760.  There was quite a bit
that couldn't be rendered at that time. The problem was more abc than
abc2ps: it couldn't do segnos, fermata over bar lines, D.C. (or anything
else which went below the staff), mordents, or sharp signs over turn
signs over notes. (Still can't do that one!) It could do the tildes and
tr over notes but they looked looked pretty cheesy; and in the airs
there was quite a bit of other stuff---e.g. dynamic markings such as pp,
ff, and crescendo hairpins. Tempo and expression indicators at the top
of the tune such as quickly, cheerfully, slowly etc. had to be
done with guitar chords and never looked right... et cetera and et
cetera. This was one of the main reasons to implement the !  !
notation.

Incidentally, for abc historians: if you have a copy of a Basic
manual collecting dust on your shelves, check out the PLAY command.


Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] The abc standard

[John Walsh]

This response is a little late---I'm still re-installing things
after a crash, and am just getting around to the abc programs.

Irwin Oppenheim writes:

   The problem---or one of the problems---is simply that this isn't
 good enough when you care how the output looks. (Not to mention that 
the
   notation is way overloaded already...)

I think that ^+ looks quite good in Abcm2ps: nicely
centered over the notehead.



The ^+ and + both seem to put the plus sign in the same place,
which is over the staff. I'd probably want to experiment, but my
preference would be to have it just above the notehead.  That might
require a different font size to fit.  This would hold for the minus sign
too--tenuto--which I've usually seen placed just above the note, not above
the staff.

If you want something really special, you can always
use the %%postscript and %%deco commands, see for
example: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/abc/deco.html


This is a very interesting feature.  I'll have to look into it.
The @ foo looks useful.  Can it place things relative to a note on the
staff? (As do  foo and  foo?)


This gives you ultimate control and freedom, at the
price of being package dependent.


Non-portability isn't a problem for me, since I'm using abc2mtex
and its macros---which handle this---for my serious printing, and it's
hard to get less portable than that. However, I'd like to see abc make at
least a part of this official (and therefore portable). I've found it
useful, and I'm sure others will too.

Cheers,
John Walsh





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Re: [abcusers] Re: End of 2nd time bar

[John Walsh]

Bernard Hill writes:

 Surely a performer wants to know what the writer meant? And lack of
 repeat starts means there is no information as to how the tune was
 to be played, eg whether the whole tune repeated or just to the
 previous double or repeat bar.

 imo notation which is incorrect should be flagged by software and a
 clarification requested from a human being.


Jack Campin replies:

How do you propose to interrogate Captain O'Neill?

I never use repeat-start signs unless they'll appear in mid-staff-line
(the convention used by O'Neill and mostly by Kerr).  This is pretty
normal in the folk world, and probably 99.9% of all the ABC ever typed
in would fit the assumption that the previous repeat or double bar, if
it's located at the end of a line, marks the start of the repeat.

There are undoubtedly cases where you want to do it differently, but
it would be nuts to make such an alternative the default interpretation
an ABC player made, even if it is the official one in the textbooks.

Bernard Hill responds:

But if the software is the sort which splits the ends at a new position
you then a user of different software has a different repeat structure
to the one you wrote...


My two cents:

Irish dance music has a very simple structure---which is shared by
the rest of the British Isles dance music, I think, but let me stick to
what I know---in which tunes are composed of parts.  Each part may or may
not be repeated, but the repeat always goes back to the start of the part.  
There may be exceptions, but I can't think of any at the minute.  (Well,
there are tunes which have the first part repeated as the third part;  I
suppose you could be fancy and write the second part and fourth parts as
first and second endings, but you'd end up with music even more confusing
than this sentence, so the first part is simply written out again, rather
than with repeat signs.)

Tunes are usually written with each part ended by a double
bar---repeat signs count as a double bars, of course---so there is no
ambiguity if you start each repeat from the most recent double bar.  It
won't confuse musicians who know the music, for the performer does know
where the repeat starts.  (The playback may sound a bit funny if this
messes up the pick-up notes, but it doesn't bother traditional musicians,
who are used to figuring out pick-up notes for themselves.) Lots of people
write it this way, including O'Neill.  (Well...most of the time, but for
some reason he uses begin-repeats for hornpipes, but seldom uses them for
jigs and reels.)

I'm not so sure about the distinction between mid-bar and end-bar
repeats that Jack makes.  I didn't notice it in O'Neill's, but then I only
checked a couple of tunes. I did check a few of the tune books on my
shelves for begin-repeats.  Most books use them carefully, but a sizeable
minority, including those I like the most, often omit them.

Since O'Neill's omitted begin-repeats, one might expect that those
who learned from his books, or from people who learned from his books,
will do the same.  That's a lot of people.

So for Irish dance music, at least, omission of the begin-repeat
is not bad abc, for the begin-repeat is simply superfluous. Underline:
*for this type of music.* It's just a style of writing.  I don't know
about Jack's figure of 99%, but the vast majority of abc on the net
consists of dance tunes, much of it written without begin-repeats, and I'd
expect an abc application to handle it gracefully.

Of course, if the application has to handle classical, jazz and
pop as well, where the begin-repeats are necessary, there is a problem:
how does it know what kind of music it's handling?  I suppose that it
could look at the R: field.  If it says jig, reel or hornpipe, no problem.  
If the C: field says Beethoven or Bach, there's no problem either.  
Hmmmsome people might think that doesn't cover all the interesting
cases...

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] The abc standard

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

Actually, I've long done this, by simply using +.  But there are  a
couple  of  problems  with  this.   One  is  that  this is, with some


The problem---or one of the problems---is simmply that this isn't
good enough when you care how the output looks. (Not to mention that the 
  notation is way overloaded already...)


When the !...! notation first came out, I thought that it would be  a
fix for these problems. Great; now we have a way to correctly flag a
bit of text as a  musical  annotation  other  than  an  accompaniment
chord.  But  this  hope  was dashed when it became clear that people
intend !...! to only allow things on a restricted list.  I can't  use


It clearly has to be expanded to take arguments.

Cheers,

John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] The abc standard

[John Walsh]

Am still catching up with last weeks postings...

John Chambers writes:

Which does remind me of a suggestion I've long thought of making: Any
Baroque  musician  is familiar with the convention that a '+' above a
note means Ornament this note somehow.  It's a generic,  unspecific
ornament symbol. I personally would like it to mean this in abc. This
really just means that '+' would be added to  the  list  of  ornament
symbols, and the default display form is merely a '+' above the note.
It should be definable, of course.  And a clever abc  player  program
could pick a random ornament from its repertoire.


Ok, but you don't have to make the plus sign a part of abc.  
There could simply be a macro---or escape or macro-like entity, or
whatever you want to call it---which will put *any* desired character
over/under a note.  Then you simply tell the macro that the character it's
adding is a plus sign, and alias it with one of H---Z, say P, for plus.  
Then |ABc Pdef| puts a plus sign over the d.  (Of course you need a way of
making minute adjustments in the position of the plus sign so it'll look
good---they seldom look just right without a little adjustment.) The
advantage of this that you can put other articulation signs over the note
with the same generic macro.

I think you could try this out in your abc2ps clone without too
much difficulty.  Contact me off list if you're interested.

Cheers,
John
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Re: [abcusers] A-G fields in tune

[John Walsh]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote:

 Er, what's an E: field? The draft 1.7.6 knows nothing of E.


It was used in abc2mtex in order to set the note-spacing for
musicTeX.  When musicTeX was replaced by musiXTeX---a much improved
version which has a built-in note-spacing algorithm---it became
unneccessary.  (Except to those, if any, who continued to use
abc2mtex/musicTeX---abc2mtex can put out code for either.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] K:Hp anyone?

[John Walsh]

I. Oppenheim writes:

So it's a microtonal instrument! Someone wrote that the
HP plays all notes half a note higher than notated. Did
I understand that correctly?

Microtonal?  Naah---it just plays the bagpipe scale.  

More history:  around the turn of the century, the keynote of the
highland pipes was originally around A, give or take a little---might have
even been a bit flat of A.  It started climbing, probably due mostly to
competitions---the higher pitch sounded a little more exciting to the ears
of pipe-band judges---so players started tuning up a little...and a little
more...and then the top makers started making slightly sharper chanters...
This has been going on for some time---I have a chanter ca 1960 which is
far too flat to play with present-day bands.  The pitch is presently about
Bb, which fits fine for playing with brasses, but I think that's a side
benefit, not the cause.

In fact, I think that the actual intonation of the scale has even
changed slightly in the last couple of decades, mainly to accomodate
modern used-to-well-tempered-scale-ears, and to play with brass bands.  
I'm not sure that the figures given here would have been valid fifty years
ago.  (It still has a *long* way to go to get to well-temperedness, tho.)

This has some strange effects---there's a Boston-Pops type musical
whose title I forget---Highland Wedding, or Sunrise??--which has a
bagpipe-with-orchestra passage.  This worked fine when it was originally
written.  Now the production travels around with an old bagpipe chanter
which is heavily taped and rushed to get it down to A-440; whoever's hired
to play the piece in that production gets to use it.

 And some people would deny that the instrument is
 even tunable.  ;-)

That is to say that HPs cannot play together?

Hey, it was tuned at the factory, that's good enough for me!  
The old jokes are the best. Actually, the chanters from most makers play
pretty well together, but good pipe bands buy matched chanters from one
maker for their band work, whatever the members might do for their solo
piping.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Stars and Bangs

[John Walsh]

Historical note: the first versions of abc2mtex used musciTeX---a
music macro package for TeX---which did not automatically justify lines.  
You had to explicitly ask it to right-justify, and in order to make this
look right, you had to adjust the note-spacing a bit.  It took some work.  
Then musixTeX replaced musicTeX.  It had a far superior linebreaking and
note-spacing algorithms, so the hard linebreak  *  became less useful.  
They were, and are, still useful, however, to give the program a little
help, and keep it from breaking at awkward spots, so that it doesn't, for
example, break right after the pick-up notes to the next part.

One thing which should be mentioned is that hard line-breaks
are usually dependent on the font, staff size, and all sorts of
parameters which will change from program to program.  Something
which is carefully formatted for abcwin, for example, might not look
very good on abc2ps.  

In my own case, I have a slight stake in this since I put some
files of session tunes on the net in `94.  These are still used quite
a bit. They use  *  for a hard line break and sometimes ** to signal
the final staff. These were all optimized for musicTeX, and I would
hope that any other program printing them out would simply ignore
them gracefully---they'll probably look better if formatted with the
program's own algorithm than with the (now inappropriate) line-breaks
I inserted.

For this reason, I am not at all convinced that abc2win has
committed abc in any way to  !  as a hard linebreak.  Those breaks were
mostly inserted by the program, not the writer, and fit abcwin's format,
but not necessarily anyone else's.  And I'll bet that a good percentage
of those who use them knowingly now are on this list and can speak to the
issue themselves.

Cheers,
John Walsh

Bernard Hill writes:

 But * is already part of the standard as a right-justified linebreak and
 I've seen plenty of tunes that use it. 
 
 Is *that* what it means!
 
 But what is a right-justified linebreak? Or more to the point, what's a
 NON-right justified line break?
 
 When printing music I would expect the music to look like
 
 
 
 
 
 ===
 
 with only the last line maybe not being right-justified.
 
 Does non-right justify mean the score could be
 
 =
 ==
 
 ===
 
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Re: [abcusers] Solution for ! notation?

[John Walsh]

Eric Galuzzo writes:
2. abc2midi (not abcm2ps, by the way) originally introduced !...! for
dynamics, !ppp! to !fff!.  abcm2ps adopted it.  It too is useful for
symbols, dynamics, etc.  Very few tunes have this construct in it.

Irwin has said, rightly as it seems to me, that both are useful. 
However, they also seem to be incompatible.  So, why not pick a symbol
other than ! for the latter usage?  * seems ideal, and quite
logical, too: in emails, IRC, etc., it is commonly used to boldface or
emote something.  Thus:


My first reaction is that !  is better, since in !ppp! it is
used as a delimiter, and delimiters are tall and skinny, while  *  is
short and fat.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Stars and Bangs

[John Walsh]

Irwin Oppenheim wrote:

 
 So if * serves as the !break! command, what symbol
 could we use for the !nobreak! command that was
 proposed by Laura?
 

Well, if  \  is the symbol for continuation, which tells
the program Don't feel you have to put a linebreak here,
you could have  \\  for and I really mean it.

But there is a principle we're running into, now that free symbols
are so scarce:  something like  \\  is easy to type and quite visible,
so one might want to save it for something which will be used a lot. I
suspect a no-linebreak won't get much general use, tho people who use it
at all might use it a lot.  This would make it a candidate for a directive
something like

 !whatever-you-do-please-don't-break-the-line-here!

which will, of course be used this way:

U:N = whatever-you-do-please-don't-break-the-line-here

... |abc def| N
ABC DEF|...

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

Bryan Creer writes:
| John Chambers wrote -
|
| BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot  count  the
| tunes  that  seemed  to come from abc2win.
| 
| Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ...
|
| Could you count the tunes that use !! ?


Since the code scans each tune, I can count anything that I
can  write  a perl pattern for. 


While checking that, you might also check for * at the line
ends.  Abc2mtex used for that a right-justified line break. It became
nearly superfluous when MusixTeX was introduced, but it's still mentioned
in the 1.6.1 docs.  I know I used it on some session tune files I put on
the web in '94.  (Of course, it won't be in that many tunes since it had
to be entered by hand, as opposed to having the program automatically add
it.)

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] Renaissance notes, anyone?

[John Walsh]

Guido Gonzato writes,

 
 with very little effort, abcm2ps could typeset scores using
 Renaissance-style notes; that is, those fancy square or diamond-shaped
 notes. To this end, we'd need two things:
 [...] 
 2) new note shapes, which I could easily write as new PostScript routines.
 


Is there documentation that explains abc2ps fonts and how to
write them, or is this something one should learn by reading the code? I
have use for a couple of obscure symbols (they wouldn't be of much
interest to anybody whose instruments don't cran or play ghost D's) and
I'd thought of adding them to my own copy. If, of course, there is a good
way to get abc2ps to put them where they should go.

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] McLeod's Reel [was: abc in web pages]

[John Walsh]

Jack Campin writes:

I'd prefer something
 like this - based on the Scottish version, in A, but still for two
 flutes:
 
 X:2
 T:Mrs McLeod of Raasay
 M:C|
 L:1/8
 K:A Mixolydian,  etc . . . 

Is this a good excuse to post our favorite versions of McLeod's?
Here's one I like, from the playing of Michael Coleman, courtesy of David
Lyth's book, Bowing Styles in Irish Fiddle Playing v. 1 (transcriptions of
Coleman, Morrison, Killoran.) Complete with bowing, which was the point of
the book. Twice thru, to give an idea of the variations he played.

This brings up a couple of questions: has anyone tried to
incorporate bowing in a playback program? Second, are there abc sites
which have Irish fiddle tunes with bowing indicated? Must be a few around,
but I don't know the magic words to use with JC's tune finder. (I'm
looking for Sligo or Clare style, which probably means transcriptions of
someone's playing.)

Cheers,
John Walsh

X:1
T:McLeod's Reel
R:reel
B:Bowing Styles in Irish Fiddle Playing vol. 1, by David Lyth
Z:from transcription of Michael Coleman
M:C|
L:1/8
K:G
(uF|G2) BG DGBG|G(B{d}BA Bc)BA |(vG2B)(G DG)B(uG|AF)F/F/(F A)(cBA)|
(vG2 BG d)(GBG)|G(B{d}BA) (Bcd)g|e(c{d}cB) (cde)(f| {a}gf)ge (dBA)(F|
uG2) B/B/(G DGB)G|G(BB{d}A Bc)BA|vGAB(G DG)B(uG|AF)F/F/(F B)(FAF)|
vGABG DGBG|G(B{d}BA Bc)dg|e(c{d}cB) (cde)(f|{a}gf)ge (dBA)(F|
uG2) (gf e)(dgd|B/)c/BA(c Bc)BA|vGd(gf e)(dc)(B|A)(GF)(E D)(CB,A,)|
vG,D(gf e)(dgd)|B/c/BAc (Bc)dg|e(c{d}cB) (cde)(f|{a}gf)ge (dBA)(F|
uG2) (gf e)(dgd)|(uB2 {c}BA) (BcB)(ud|g2)(fg e)(fg)e|(ua2 b/a/g)(a2 b)(a|
ug/)a/gfg ve(dgd)|B/c/BAc (Bc)dg|(ve/f/g)(fa) gba(f|{a}ge)df (ecA)(F||
uG2) B/B/(G DGB)(G|DG)B/B/(G B)u(cBA|G/)vG/uGvBuG DGB(G|AF)F/F/(F A)(cBA)|
vG/G/G(BG) DGBG|G(B{c}BA Bc)dg|e(c{d}cB) (cde)(f|{a}gf)ge (dBA)(F|
uG2)B/B/(G DGB)(G|DGB)(G Bc)BA|uG2 B/B/(G DGB)(G|AF)F/F/(F A)(FBA)|
G/G/G(BG) DGBG|G(B{d}BA Bc)dg|e(c{d}cB) (cde)(f|{a}gf)ge (dBA)(F|
uG)dgf e(dg)u(d|B2 {c}BA) (BcB)A|Gd(gf e)(dc)(B|A)(GFG) A(cBA)|
vGd(gf e)(dgd)|B/c/BAc (Bc)dg|e(c{d}cB) (cde)(f|{a}gf)ge (dBA)(F|
uG2) (gf e)(dg)d|u(B2{d}BA) (BcB)u(f|g2)(fg e)(fg)e|u(a2 b/a/g) (a2b)(a|
ug/)a/gfg ve(dgd)|B/c/B Ac (Bc)dg|v(e/f/g)(fa) gba(f|{a}ge)df (ec A)z||

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Re: [abcusers] more abc interpretation questions

[John Walsh]

Phil Taylor writes:

|
| MusicXML has an interesting construct to deal with this kind of 
situation.
| The backup and forward tags have the effect of moving the time 
point,
| so you can use backup to go back to the start of a measure in order to
| add an extra layer of notes.  This means that you can deal with 
temporary
| voices which appear and disappear in the course of a piece.
|
| Maybe we need something similar in abc?

and John Chambers answers:

I sorta  recall  reading  about  just  such  a  feature  in
abc2mtex,  with  a  comment  that it probably wouldn't work
with other abc programs.  I've never read about anyone else
ever implementing it.

Now what was that syntax? ...




That was a hack, a quick-and-dirty way to get voices. It worked
because it took advantage of something already in MusixTeX. Here's how it
worked: write a group of notes (in abc) for each voice, i.e. in the
simplest case, write one measure for voice one, the same measure for voice
2, and so on. Separate them by  (this is a tab stop in TeX). When
you've finished with all the voices, put in a  and go back to the top,
and do the same for the next measure.

Ie, to write abc def for a couple of voices, you
could write

ABC  abc  DEF  def  etc..

This follows the way that MusixTeX is organized---in fact,
abc2mtex simply passes the  characters directly on to MusixTeX, and
lets it figure out what to do with them.

This did actually work, but one had to really need it to go to the
trouble of using it. I did once and found it was hard to write and
fiendish to debug the abc. After that, I found I didn't really need
multiple voices *that* badly. (So, before putting in any backup
directives, I recommend experimenting to see how difficult it makes
reading, writing, and, especially, correcting the abc.)

Nevertheless, the use of the  as a tab stop might be
something to think about for handling tricky alignment problems.
(After all, it's a bit much to expect these programs to be able
to solve *all*  voice-alignment problems unaided.)

Here is an example where it might help, tho maybe there is
a way to write it in abc-as-is without ending up with something
unreadable. I think this particular example was just cooked up; it's in
the MusixTeX docs to illustrate how Musixtex can handle polyrhythmic
music, but it does show one of the problems with voices. Since I'm not
sure how to write it correctly in abc, I won't try. Three voices, each on
a separate staff, all in the key of C, but all with different meters. The
staves are joined by a bar at the left.

Voice 1:
[M:3/4] [L:1/4] F F F | F F F || F F F | F F F :|

Voice 2: 
[M:2/4] [L:1/4] F F | F F | F F || F F | F F | F F :|

Voice 3:  
[M:3/8] [L:1/8] F3 | FFF | F3 FFF | F3 | FFF || F3 | FFF | F3 | FFF | F3 | FFF :|

 

The tricky point is the alignment, since one wants the notes which
are played simultaneously to align vertically. The quarter and dotted
quarter notes should line up. This means that the bar lines *don't* line
up in general, except for the double bars.


Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Chinese tunes

[John Walsh]

Henrik Norbeck writes:

 T:Two Fountains Reflect the Moonlight
 T:The Moon Reflected in Er-Quan

With my minimal knowledge of Chinese I would say both titles are 
translations, but the second one only partial. Er is Chinese for 
two.  My dictionary says one meaning of quan is spring, well.


Aha!  This explains a third translation of the title,
which is The Moon Reflected on the Second Springs.

By the way, the composer, Hua Yen-Chun, known as Blind Abing in his
later life, is much more interesting than might appear from my short
description, which I suspect is what is taught in the schools. See
Jonathan Stock's page:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/music/staff/js/AbPref.html

This includes some musical analyses of Abing's solos, and an interesting
discussion of how the Cultural Revolution's unique interaction of art
and politics forced an intellectual tightrope-walk by Abing's
biographer. Stock's humor is dry and cutting. You can look it up
yourself, but I can't resist quoting a couple of sideswipes which apply
to Western as well as Chinese music:

 On a form of musical analysis due to Herr Schenker:

Devised for use on Western classical music, this form of analysis can be
useful elsewhere also, though certain modifications are necessary.
(Herr Schenker probably wouldn't agree. His thoughts on Chinese music do
not appear to have been recorded, which is probably just as well; we do
know that he believed all music from France and Italy to be unnatural
and degenerate).


When speaking of Abing's biographer---and Stock casts strong 
doubts on his accuracy (too PC, Maoist version)---he writes:

In all this, Yang was immeasurably assisted by the fact the Abing had
died before the publication of his material. (As a general rule,
musicologists do rather seem to like their composers dead.) 


Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] Chinese tunes

[John Walsh]

   Second question: I have a Chinese book of flute tunes, written out
 much like abc, but in numbers, not letters. If I could read the Chinese
 introduction, I probably wouldn't have to ask but...does anybody here 
know
 anything about this notation? Is it particular to the flute, or is it a
 general music notation?


Replying to John and Bert's suggestions that this is either tablature or
solfege, I think it's the latter, and the numbers indicate the notes of
the scale, from 1 to 7. (With the occasional puzzling zero.) At least
the tunes seem to sound ok with that interpretation, tho that's
hardly a foolproof test! They use western sharps and flats for
accidentals, so I don't think they write out cross-fingering. (There are
a number of western symbols mixed in: time signature, tuplets, and
trills, for instance, and even some western characters, e.g. f, pp, mf,
etc. No key signature needed---these are six-hole flutes, no
keys, and they come in sets, so you just pull out another flute to
change keys.) Time values seem to be indicated by note-position within a
measure. On the other hand, there are single and double underlines, and
various shapes of dots above and below the notes, and occasional dots
following notes. I think the dots above the note indicate a second
octave, but I'm not sure of the rest.

Toby Rider writes: 

  Scan a copy of the instructions and send them to me. I can read a
moderate number of characters and my mother is fluent. So we can tell
you what it says.



Excellent!  It'll take me a day or so to get within
range of a scanner, but I'll try the first couple of pages.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Chinese tunes

[John Walsh]

 Here's a Chinese piece* for the Erhu ...

which uses some ABC constructs I've not seen before.

BarFly guesses that P means an inverted mordent, but offers no
suggestions about what J is.  Clue us in?


Oops. That was from the private tune-cellar. Hadn't expected to
send it out, so I forgot to check for non-standard (to others) abc when I
did.  P is for emphasis and J is a slide up. (Thought that one was
generally accepted.)

When using constructs that go beyond abc 1.6 it's a good idea
to describe them in the header.


Agreed.  And as a corollary, I hope that people writing playback
programs make it possible to reassign the letters H-Z, or at least disable
the defaults.  I know Abcmus does.  It's a real drag to hear emphasis
interpreted as an inverted mordent with no way of changing it.

Cheers,


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Re: [abcusers] Chinese tunes

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

Do we have people here who  are  transcribing  Chinese  pop
music?  Actually, I'd be more interested in the traditional
music, but new music is more interesting as a test case.

From  what  I  know  of  traditional Chinese music, I don't
think there would be many  problems  putting  it  into  abc
form.   Since it's mostly still pretty close to pentatonic,
there aren't many problems  with  scales.   

 

Here's a Chinese piece* for the Erhu, the Chinese two-string
fiddle. (I've always thought of it as classical, but I suppose it could be
called traditional, too.)  It's usually played as a duet with the pipa
(Chinese lute.) I wrote it out for the pipes, which is why it's in D mix
instead of the original A mix. (I could say I arranged it, but a better
description would just be sloppy transcription.)  Surprisingly enough,
it does work well for the pipes, and the rule of thumb has it that it
would also work well for the flute, since good pipe tunes usually suit the
flute and vice-versa. (Caveat: as with any music lifted from someone
else's tradition, I continually have to go back to the original to remind
myself of how it really should sound. The dots are a help, but they only
indicate which way the tune goes, not how it should get there.) I may have
changed a couple of notes to fit, but hopefully not too many. The main
changes are omissions: the erhu is made to slide into and out of notes,
and there are many important slides in the piece, both up and down. I only
noted a few of the slides up and none of the slides down (can't do them
well enough on the pipes.) Trills are another problem: one needs to be
able to say where they start and when they stop. I just wrote tr.

The reason for the two titles is that a friend gave me the first,
which I figure is probably correct, and the second was on the CD I
transcribed it from.

Question: does anyone here know how much latitude there is for
improvisation in traditional Chinese classical music? I have two
recordings of this tune. They agree for the first time thru, and
subsequent repeats are variations which I suspect might be traditionally
left to the performer. (The particular recording I transcribed had five
repeats. I wrote out two.)

Second question: I have a Chinese book of flute tunes, written out
much like abc, but in numbers, not letters. If I could read the Chinese
introduction, I probably wouldn't have to ask but...does anybody here know
anything about this notation? Is it particular to the flute, or is it a
general music notation?

Cheers,
John Walsh

* A story goes with it, and I'll pass it on, exactly as it was told to
me:

 It was composed in the 1940s. The composer was a poor young man
who suffered greatly from the ruling class and Japanese troops. When his
lover, a folk singer, was taken away from him by evil forces, he was
extremely sad. Not long after, he became blind. One night he sat lonely
beside a stream, playing the erhu.  He was in extreme grief and
indignation. Two Fountains Reflect the Moonlight was composed at this
moment.

snip snip-

X:1
T:Two Fountains Reflect the Moonlight
T:The Moon Reflected in Er-Quan
C:Hua Yen-Chun 
M:4/4
S:Chang Jui, Erhu
Z:John Walsh 09/99
L:1/4
Q:1/4=140
K:DMix
B/A/B/|G2 G F/ Hz/|E4-|E4|PE2 JEF|D2 (DE)|F4-||F2 .F .A|B2 A2|BA Bd|
JA3 F|A2 AF|E2 B2|(AB) (DE)|F4-|F4|EF Ad|BE FA|D4-|D4||
d2 (Bd|Jf2) fe|d3 JB|de ff|e2 (dB)|JBd ef|A4-|A4|
a2 fa|ba bd'|Ja3 f|Ja3d'|b2 b2|ab aa|af2A|(a2 f) a|
ef ed|Bd dB|Jd4-|d3 z/ e/|Jfa de|fa f b |a4-|a4||
.Az .dz|BA Bd|(A3 F)|A3 F|EF Ad|BE FA|D4-|D4|
d2 Bd|f2 fe|d3 B|Jde ff|e2 d2|Bd ef|A4-|A4||
.Az .az|fa fa|b4|d'2 d'2|(af) {a}fa|ba d'b|(a3 f)|Ja3 d'|b2 b2|ab aa|
(af)-f d|a2 fa|ef ed|rallBd dB|(Jd3 B)-|Jd3 e|Jfa d2|fa{g}ab|a4-|a4||
A2 AB|AA FA|trB4-|B4-|{A}B4-|{A}B4|b2 d'2|ba bd'|Ja3 f|Ja3 d'|b2 b2|ab 
aa|(a f2) d|a2 (af)|ef ed|Bd dB|d3 B|d2-de|Jfa d2|fa gb|a4-|a4||


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Re: [abcusers] abc drum notation and abc2ps

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

wil writes:
| another way to approach this is to have a special keysig or clef for 
drum notation - just
| as K:HP is supposed to draw notes in highland pipes style (all stems 
up, grace
notes beamed
| together, default gracenote have 2 flags, if I recall correctly), then 
something like
| K:drum could draw note heads as 'x'...

Well, yeah, and that would make a  lot  of  drummers  happy
with abc. But it probably wouldn't answer the question that
started this thread.  There are a lot of uses for 'x'  note
heads in other than drum music, and usually you want it for
just a few notes.  So what is needed is a way to say  draw
just these few notes with 'x' heads.

Both approaches would be really useful, of course.  And for
drums,  you  also  want to be able to specify the number of
lines on the staff, since there's a lot of 1- and  2-  line
drum  notation.  This isn't without precedent in abc; we've
already seen a description of  an  abc  program  that  does
4-line medieval staff notation.

Obligatory first comment: of course, this can all be done with
abc2mtex. Obligatory second comment: but I've forgotten exactly how.
(Actually, x-heads are easy, but putting strokes thru the note-stems might
be ugly.)

However, a better solution would be to just haul off and do it. I
like Wil's suggestion of making a percussion key or clef part of abc, for
a couple of reasons:

First, while we can probably just hack it, we're running
out of free notation.  It's better to save scarce resources and simply
do it right the first time.

Next, abc is eventually going to have to include percussion
notation anyway. We've avoided it for a long time, but the present problem
seems clear and can probably be solved fairly directly, so it's a good
starting place. The main concern is to to be careful not to close off
further extensions to the percussion cleffor there are bound to be
many if percussionists ever start getting interested in abc.

Thirdly, once there is a special percussion clef, the rules can
change: some notation will be freed because it'll be irrelevant to the
percussion clef---e.g. a percussion score which needs up-bow and down-bow
would be very modern indeed. And...less than five lines in a staff?  Why
not?  So it may not be too difficult to solve this problem. Clearly, it
needs careful discussion---e.g can we use x for notes, or will it be
needed for its present purpose?---but, hey, we're good at that, and if we
start with something concrete and think small, it should be possible to
come up with a good solution, namely a compact, human-readable notation
for the side-drums. (And after that, the world...)


Finally---call it spin-off or collateral damage as you
please---solving the note-head problem in this setting may end up solving
it in general. (And you can call me Pollyanna for thinking it will all be
that simple...)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] abc's of old-time, country, texas swing andbluegrass

[John Walsh]

 
 wget -A  gif -r  http://memory.loc.gov/afc/afcreed/
 
 (linux)  gets the gifs  quite a lot of other stuff too
 

wget is in cygwin (PC) too.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Explicit key signatures

[John Walsh]

 bother to remember which
accidentals are needed, and to do all that typing; it's easier to write
K:D, or even K:EDor, than K:^f^g; and it's far easier to proofread. (Note
the typo.)  So my suspicion is that it'll be used mainly by people who
have a reason to use it.

Finally, if we want to make life easier for people transcribing
from manuscript by permitting them to use an incomplete description
of key, perhaps we should do the same thing for those transcribing
by ear, and permit them to specify only the tonic.  After all,
any competent musician who was familiar with the tradition concerned
should easily be able to figure out where to put the necessary
accidentals in order to make sense of the tune.  It's not a completely
daft suggestion;  it just shifts the reponsibility for working out
the difficult bit of the K: field from the transcriber to the user,
and is exactly analagous to the original suggestion.


Well, not *exactly* analogous.  With the key sig alone, good sight
readers can play the tune correctly right out of the box, but with the
tonic alone and no keysig, they'd have to play a fair amount of it first
to figure out what are the wrong notes.  And even then, it's possible to
make mistakes. For example, O'Neill printed the Cliffs of Moher in one
sharp---G major---and Krassen, in his edition, corrected that to one
sharp--A Dorian. Since O'Neill was careless with some of his modes, I
think Krassen felt there must have been an error there.  But, while it's
usually played in A dorian today, the G major version is, in fact, played
too---Tommy Keane recorded it that way a couple of years ago, as learned
from his teacher, who learned from _his_ teacher...so that wasn't a
mistake in O'Neill, just a different version. (Actually, it's an unusual G
major tune---except for the keynote, it sounds mixolydian; and in fact it
sounds quite good if you change the key to K:Gmix.  That gives three nice
tunes for the price of one (G, GMix, and ADor)  all sounding different,
and all sounding traditional.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] RE : tune finder

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

One of the cuter illustrations of this: There's an old test
for  telling whether someone is a scientist/engineer or one
of those humanities types.  You ask them If you call a tail
a leg, how many legs does a dog have?

The answer, of course, is Four, because calling a  tail  a
leg  doesn't  make  it one. (At which point the humanities
types all get indignant.  ;-)


Unless they're historians, in which case they say,
Yep, that's a good ole Abe Lincoln story.

Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] Some minor complaints about abc

[John Walsh]

The only part of ABC that I could see that would affect how cramped 
together a peice of music would look in staff notation is the length of 
individual lines.  Most ABC to Staff converters I know of do not break 
lines of ABC into multiple lines of staff notation.  Obviously, the same 
piece of music is going to look more cramped if written as 2 lines of 8 
measures than 4 lines of 4 measures.


If you check out the documentation to abc2ps, you'll find a number
of ways to control the note spacing--it recommends putting well-chosen
linebreaks in the abc, but that can be overridden, and there are a couple
of parameters that can be adjusted and some command-line options, e.g.  
one can specify the number of bars per line.

One possibility which I have found useful elsewhere, and which
might be worthwhile adding, is to specify the total number of lines for a
tune, leaving the line-breaking decisions to the program. (I have
absolutely no idea how easy/difficult this is.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Re: To tell the dancer from the dance

[John Walsh]

Bryan Creer writes:

Well, it didn't take much figuring since that is what I stated explicitly but 
it is the public aspect of abc that I was referring to.  I'm not sure why you 
consider this mislistthropic.  


I don't at all---I was just referring to your statement that:

 There was no intention of sarcasm 
but perhaps my dealings with this list have left me a little bitter and 
twisted.



   ...What I don't want is to be told You can't use 
character such-and-such in your new abc extension, even though it would  be of 
enormous benefit to all users, because I'm already using it to indicate 
forked F on the oboe.  (It's a slightly different pitch so it is 
musically 
relevant.)


This brings up a problem I've noticed in some of the abc2ps
clones, tho it's probably more general: some of the characters H--Z are
permanently bound to notation---J to a slide, H to a fermata, S to a
segno, P to a pralltriller... (The first three don't bother me, since I
use the same characters for the same things, but the fourth does, since I
don't.) According to the standard, these characters are supposed to be
free, but they are rapidly being taken up.  I have no real quarrel with
this---I use most of the characters the same way myself, and I'm glad for
the extra notation---*as long as there is a way to turn it off*. (!)  Or
even better, to redefine the binding.  It could be an entry in the fmt
file, for instance.  In other applications, it could be in preferences.  
Or...it could even be a formal part of abc...

Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] Re: The F F (and F F2) problems

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

Actually,  what  would  be  better  would  be  to  have  it
recognize  R:hornpipe  as meaning that  implies a triplet,
while R:strathspey rewrites  as .  While strathspeys  do
have  triplets,  they  are always notated as such (and have
three notes).   But  it's  common  to  overdot  both  the
long+short and short+long (snap) rhythms to the extent that
you can.  You also sometimes hear the  small  notes  played
evenly, though this isn't common.


That's all possible.  One of the many nice features of Henrik
Norbeck's abcmus is that the user can set the ratios for broken rhythms
via the stress program. Ditto with the swing for straight rhythm.  It uses
the R: and M: fields to identify the type of tune, and lets one set the
swing for straight and broken rhythm separately for each type of tune.  
You can set the ratio to be about anything you like.  So it's possible to
have the ratio 2:1 for broken rhythm in hornpipes and 3:1 in strathspeys.

I just checked the settings in my copy, and found that for
hornpipes in common time, the measures |AFDE FEDF| and |AFDE FEDF| are
played exactly the same way!  (That's not necessary, it's just the way
it's set up.  The ratio, by the way, is 7:5, not 2:1 or 3:1.  Probably a
little too straight for most people, but I kinda like it.)  The ratios are
quickly changed, so it's easy to experiment with overdotted rhythms to
see what they sound like.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Re: To tell the dancer from the dance

[John Walsh]

Bryan Creer wrote:

Oh, did Bryan mean that statement seriously? Hmm... I thought
there was a hint of sarcasm there, just as I've taken this entire
thread as an indirect demonstration that the saying abc is for the music
alone* (_whatever_ that may mean), is a worthy rule of thumb for overall
design, but an unreliable guide for individual decisions.

Sorry John, but I was perfectly serious.  There was no intention of sarcasm 
but perhaps my dealings with this list have left me a little bitter and 
twisted.


Hmm...  Actually, I thought it was humor, not misanthropy
(mislistthropy?); sarcasm may not have been the right word.  In fact,
after I posted, I thought I should have said reductio ad absurdem
instead, since I figured you'd shown that that line of reasoning led to
the outlawing of instrument-specific notation in abc. Which I
thought--think--is absurd, and that everybody would agree with me on that.  
Clearly I'm wrong on at least one of the two.

From my point of view, instrument-specific notation is necessary.  
I use abc for, among other things, transcribing uilleann pipe music.  
Like most instruments, the pipes have some techniques unique to
themselves: cranning, popping, ghost D, hard and soft low D, off-the-knee
fingering, regulators...  At the minute, I can handle this more-or-less to
my satisfaction (tho I'd like more) with abc2mtex, but not with any other
application.  

One basis of misunderstanding here may be an assumption that
instrument-specific notation must be carved in stone in the language--as
u and v for upbow and downbow are now, for instance.  It doesn't.  (It
can't, really, for abc doesn't have the resources.  In my own case, I have
to invent notation which would be quite useless to almost anyone else, and
I certainly don't want to saddle others with it.)  However, I think that a
lot of the instrument specific--and other--notation could be introduced
from the users end, if there just is sufficient flexibility in abc.  (And
there is, at least potentially.)  For instance, suppose we had a
generalization of the much-overused guitar-chord mechanism which would:

(a) put arbitrary text over the staff

(b) ditto under the staff

(c) ditto over a note

(d) ditto under a note

(e) ditto in front and behind a note

and which could

(f) deal with fonts, and

(g) have enough flexibility in positioning to
keep things from overwriting each other, and even (heresy!) make them
look nice.

Then one would be able to handle much, even the majority, of these things.  
(The suggested notations ^foo and _foo are a start, but I'm more
ambitious--I think font-handling and flexible positioning are also
needed.)

[Non-uilleann example: I've just been transcribing some tunes from
Ryan's/Coles for John Chambers' project.  These include fingering for the
fiddle on some notes. I had to use guitar chords to stick this in, and, to
be charitable, it looks awful.  The numbers are too far from the notes,
and often conflict with other markings on the same notes.  I wouldn't put
up with this for my own music, but this is John's project, so I can't use
abc2mtex.]

It almost goes without saying that this implies that
definitions--the details of the way this mechanism would be used--would be
given outside the abc, either in the header or in an auxiliary file,
say--since in the abc, this would probably be called with one of the
letters H--Z, or even h--y.

Of course, the wish-list doesn't end here, but it 
would be a very good start.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Re: To tell the dancer from the dance

[John Walsh]

Bryan Creer, then Phil Taylor, wrote:

This and the example imply that the instrument being played is relevant.
Wouldn't it be best to exclude instrument specific notation from abc?  
It could get very messy if you don't.

That's a purist approach.  While it would be nice to have a notation 
system
 [...and goes on to make a good point...]


Oh, did Bryan mean that statement seriously? Hmm... I thought
there was a hint of sarcasm there, just as I've taken this entire
thread as an indirect demonstration that the saying abc is for the music
alone* (_whatever_ that may mean), is a worthy rule of thumb for overall
design, but an unreliable guide for individual decisions.

Cheers,
John Walsh

* Misquoted, I'm sure---sorry, I've forgotten the exact wording.
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Re: [abcusers] Percussion notation...

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

Hmmm ...  Y'know; that might not be too difficult.  For the x  note
heads, it would have been nice if 'x' hadn't been already taken up as
an invisible rest; it would have made an intuitively-correct modifier
for this purpose.  Maybe we could use '*' for this purpose, so the *e
would be an e with an 'x' for the note  head.   Either  clef=drum  or
clef=perc  might be good ways to show the clef.  I wonder how long it
would take to hack this into your typical abc2ps formatter?


Or even, taking a leaf from K:HP, K:perc or K:perc(ADor). Or
whatever.  A drum clef is bound to be a bit special, to say the least.  
It could have its own special rules---no need to adopt _all_ the old
rules, and carry over _all_ of the old notation, unless they're needed.  
Most things will carry over, but if something useful and intuitive in drum
notation conflicts with something fairly obscure in the rest of abc, it
shouldn't be too hard to decide between them.  (E.g., the drum clef could
even use x for the note-heads and * for invisible rests...if they're
needed. It won't break any existing tunes, since no-one has used the drum
clef yet.)

That said, how deeply is the invisible rest embedded in abc? I had
the impression it was introduced to get around the limitations of the
guitar chord mechanism.  If ever one could rationalize that...

Cheers,
John Walsh  
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Re: [abcusers] abc2mtex bugs, and musixtex a4 paper

[John Walsh]

Jean-Charles writes:

Can't abc2mtex split a tune when it's over one page ? I didn't manage to
do it even with the piece of advice in header.tex - uncomment the right
line to have one behaviour...
 
There is a line in header.tex which says \let\tune=\vbox. The
effect of this is to put the entire tune inside a TeX \vbox.  Since
pagebreaks aren't allowed inside a \vbox, this prevents page breaking in
the middle of a tune.  To allow pagebreaks, just replace it with
\let\tune=empty.  (By the way, you can change this behavior between tunes
if you have a case where you have to allow page-breaking for one tune but
don't want it for others.  It takes a little experimentation to find where
in the abc to put the commands, tho, and I've forgotten the details.)


I also get the error message \outline? when I put titles in the middle
of a tune.

It seemed to work if I put the T:Newtitle at the start of a line,
but not if I put it in the middle.  I didn't get that particular error
message, tho.

Has anyone solved itself the problem tuplets cannot follow gchord ?


A bug.  Try putting the guitar chord in front of the *second* or
third note of the triplet rather than in front of the whole triplet, i.e.
(3ADBc instead of D(3ABc.  (For some reason, abc2mtex chokes if you
put it before the first note of the triplet.)

I just tryed to print my 100-pages-traditionnal-tune-collection, and I
realized that the layout size doesn't fit my 'a4' printer (or rather the
paper I put in it). 

I've learned a little TeX (with difficulty) so I hope it's possible to
reduce the global layout size (\smallmusicsize doesn't do anything good
to solve my problem). 
I fear I'll have to look at some latex : every little thing related to
'a4' was found in the latex documentation and FAQ -something like


Look below page set-up in header.tex.  You can vary the height
and width of the printed page by changing the \hsize= and \vsize=
commands.  You can also change the margins with \hoffset and \voffset.  
Just experiment to find the right numbers for a4.  If you're printing a
number of tunes per page, there's one little trick to get them nicely
spaced out vertically: at the start of an empty line between tunes, type
\vfil. (This supposes that page-breaking in tunes is suppressed.)

That is,   X:1 
   bla bla

   \vfil

   X:2
   bla bla

Cheers,
John Walsh   


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Re: [abcusers] Re: abc's biggest problem

[John Walsh]

Jack Campin writes:

  
   [ the difficulties of using y to align staves ]

In theory a TeX-based system ought to obviate this kind of problem, as
TeX uses elastic boxes, ugliness scores and heuristics to optimize its
layout, and if an abc-to-TeX translator left TeX enough options that
could be put to use.  Has anybody hacked abc2mtex to deal with stuff
like multiple voices or text underlay?


I'm sure nobody's done this yet, but it would be possible, and one
should end up with something which will produce handsome staff output,
with all of the advantages and flexibilities of TeX to help out.  After
all, MusixTeX is designed to do exactly that. For lyrics alone, there's a
package called musixlyr.tex which will do a good job, tho it might require
a little tweaking to make it work.  (Excuse me if I'm a little vague
here---it's been several years since I looked at this, and I've forgotten
the details.)

My feeling is that one can do quite a bit by writing a script to
act as a preprocessor for abc2mtex.  Abc2mtex actually has multistaff
capability, tho it's pretty well hidden---it's a bit of a hack that Chris
Walshaw added as a temporary solution until he could solve the problem in
full, but it seems to work pretty well.  The problem is that it is very
hard to enter the abc for this, and twice as hard to proofread and correct
it.  And the result is not human readable. But it does work. I've used it
a couple of times, but only when I *really* needed to. However, I think
one could write a script to take abc with different staves and voices, and
put it in a form that abc2mtex can handle.

I did look at the problem of multistaff music for abc2mtex in some
detail, and I thought it would be quite possible to modify abc2mtex to
handle it.  I wrote a note which explained the problem and gave a number
of examples which showed the tex code which abc2mtex would have to write
in order to do lyrics and multistaff music. It was on sourceforge, but it
seems not to be there anymore.

By the way, musixtex uses tab stops () to align notes; Chris'
hack is simply to put the tab stops in the abc, and then pass them
directly on to musixtex. Hmm...I wonder: is it too late to simply use y as
a tab stop?

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] !fine! exclamation-point abuse

[John Walsh]

Jeff Bigler writes:

   ...is ABC's biggest handicap


which catches the eye so effectively that nobody seems to have gotten
beyond it to comment on his suggestions.  Just for the record, here's
something:

In the following example, I'm proposing  to be a delimiter for
the following characters up to the next white space represent a
symbol.


That may run into trouble in beamed notes, which are themselves
delimited by spaces: if you find ^  in the middle of a beam, does the
space after the carat end the beam or just delimit the symbol?  I suppose
you could say that you need a second space to  end the beam, but this
works better for parsers than human readers---the difference between
one and two spaces is notoriously hard to spot.  (Which pair of words
is double-spaced above?)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Chords

[John Walsh]

Henrik Norbeck writes:

Yes, but even if you set strangeness in AbcMus to 100% at least 
one of the notes in the chord must also be in the beat or bar it is 
set to, so for instance (in key of G) |GABG| could only have the 
following chords (I think):
G major, E minor, C major, B minor, D major, D minor, A major,
A minor, F major, F# minor, C minor, Eb major, G minor, B major,
E major, G# minor (the last ones are indeed pretty strange though)
But it could not have an F minor chord set to it, since none of the 
notes in that chord (F Ab c) are in the music it should be set to.


I play the pipes, so, apart from the elementary
chords one can get from the regulators, harmony is Someone Else's
Problem; and something that seems ordinary to someone
else might seem strange to me.  But it's more the overall sound 
than the individual chords.
When you crank up the strangeness on a simple Irish polka
and it comes out sounding like a fugitive from the Rites
of Spring, what else can you call it?  I'm still grinning. 

Obligatory abc content:  The R: field is only supposed
to go in the header, according to the 1.6 spec.  Now that some
playback programs use this field for their stress programs, I think it
should be allowed in the tune.  By coincidence, the tunes I 
checked before
posting this were in a medley: slide/polka/slip jig/polka, a bit of
a joke, the joke being that the rhythm changes a couple of bars
before the tune changes, e.g. the last two bars of the slide are
in 2/4, the last two bars of the polka are in 9/8, etc.  I'd like
to use the R: field there to get the rhythm change to sound right
on playback.

Cheers,
John Walsh

P.S. For those of you who don't have Abcmus and wonder what we're talking
about, (hope you don't mind, Henrik) here's Tommy Reck's Polka, with
chords set by Henrik's Cyberbacker, 2 chords/bar and strangeness = 100%.
(100% is overkill---you can get a number of different effects at much
smaller settings, which is practical, since it suggests alternate chords
to use---but we're testing the limits here.)  Listen three times before
making up your mind.  But beware: if you listen to it too much, the
ordinary accompaniment may begin to sound vapid.

X:4
T:Tommy Reck's
R:polka
Z:J Walsh
S:T. Reck
M:2/4
K:D
A#A2d2 D#fgfe|D#md2F2 A#A3d|A#mc2E2 G#mG3B|A#A2D2 FF2A2|\
A#A2d2 D#fgfe|D#md2F2 A#A3d|Fc2A2 D#G2E2|A#F2D2 A#D4:|
A#f2d2 A#d4|G#mc2B2 G#mB4|G#me2B2 G#mc2B2|FB2A2 FF2A2|\
A#f2d2 A#d4|G#mc2B2 G#mB4|G#mB2e2 A#mB2c2|Fd6 z2:|

For comparison, here it is with strangeness = 0%, still 2 chords/bar.  
It's actually the same tune...

X:4
T:Tommy Reck's
R:polka
S:T. Reck
M:2/4
K:D
DA2d2 Dfgfe|Dd2F2 DA3d|Ac2E2 GG3B|DA2D2 DF2A2|\
DA2d2 Dfgfe|Dd2F2 DA3d|F#mc2A2 EmG2E2|DF2D2 DD4:|
Df2d2 Dd4|F#mc2B2 BmB4|Eme2B2 F#mc2B2|BmB2A2 DF2A2|\
Df2d2 Dd4|F#mc2B2 BmB4|EmB2e2 BmB2c2|Dd6 z2:|


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Re: [abcusers] Chords

[John Walsh]

John Burton wrote:

Mr. Headford: as a complete beginner and Anglo concertina player what would
be useful for me is adding chords to the melody line. Or perhaps just an
appropriate base line. The ABC format and archives around the web provides
me with many fine tunes many of which seem to beg for accompanyment. That's
where I need the help.


Check out Henrik Norbeck's abc player program, Abcmus. It has a
feature which will automatically add chords to a tune, which gives a good
starting point, even if they're not always to your taste.  It will also
remove chords from abc that already has them.  In addition it has a cute
feature which is fun to play with: it allows you to adjust a strangeness
factor--the higher the strangeness factor, the stranger the chords it
sets.  And they can be pretty strange, indeed...

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] header.tex

[John Walsh]

Jean-Charles writes:

I've got some hard times with the header configuration, (displaying some
differents fields). Could someone send me an educational header.tex file, 
or its own one ?



I'll send one off-list, but there are a couple of comments of
(slightly) more general interest to make, and it's a good excuse to
insinuate some pleas that someone think about cloning abc2mtex.

There is a limitation on header fields you can use---abc2mtex
keeps track of some, but not all, of them.  As far as I can tell, it
records X, T, (and a couple of secondary titles, Ta and Tb) S, A, C, N, P,
and W.  You can use any of these from header.tex (or other included file)
or even directly in the abc, by e.g. \Sstring.  (See the header.tex file.)  
But you can't use R or Z, for instance.
   

It might be a matter of just changing a couple of lines in the
program to make more fields available.  But then...it might take more.  
Does anybody know?

In a later email:

I don't know wether Daniel Taupin version of MusiXTeX is known as 
Andreas Eaglers'  in index.tex and then I don't know if I have to
uncomment the lines (thought it seems to be better not to uncomment : it
can't find musixsig.tex and I gess it should have been in my
/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/musixtex directory). 
I also wonder if musixtex installation is allright (tough it's from a
rpm package) because i've got many problems :
music isn't right justified, though it should be with musiXtex ;
Q:3/8=120 is printed8th note = 3 ;


Perhaps you mean header.tex instead of index.tex?  There are two
versions of MusixTeX, one by Andreas Egler, and the other by Daniel
Taupin.  You evidently have Taupin's version---so don't uncomment the
lines.

For right justification: did you tex it twice?  You have to tex it
once, then run musixflx, then tex it again. It *should* come out
well-spaced and justified.  (N.B. best remove the *.mx* files before doing
this---musixtex is likely to get confused between the old and new ones if
you don't, but not nearly as confused as you'll be when you try to make
sense of the resulting error messages...)

 I think the 3/8=120 problem is a just bug in abc2mtex--again, probably
easy to fixfor someone to whom such things are easy...

(Which is not me---my shaky knowledge of C---or any other
programming language---doesn't extend to reading other people's code.  
But if anybody would care to figure out what does what in abc2mtex, I'd be
very happy to help with the MuxiXTeX side of it.)

Here's an ugly workaround for it.  In your abc file, delete the Q:
field entirely, and, right after the K: field: type a bar line (|), and,
alone on a new line, type \notes\Uptext{\metron{\qup}{120}}\enotes.  
Then start the abc on the following line.  (You'll have to experiment---I
found I had to type some abc first, or else the metronome marking would
show up below the staff (!) and the barline seemed fairly innocuous. As I
said, it's ugly.  Of course, you can leave the Q: line in, search for
\metron in the music.tex file that abc2mtex generates, and just replace
replace \qu or \cu with \qup.  This'll give you the output you
expect.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Which field for melodic codes?

[John Walsh]

I'm asking this on behalf of a friend who is considering starting a large
transcription project, entering music into abc.  He wants to use Gore
or Breathnach's melodic codes to simplify searching.  The question is,
what field to use?



The field following the K: field, of course. I'm not being
sarcastic. The information is in the abc already; it's just a question of
how to digest it for fast searching. (In a sense, an abc tune is already
organized as a database.) I don't know Gore's system, but Breathnach's
involved simplifying the first measure or so of the tune, and was
intended for a search-by-hand. This should be easy to automate:  one
should be able to write something to generate this code from the abc, and
I suspect that with the present processor speed, you'd have to search a
pretty large file--or the whole web--before it'd be a lot faster to put
this into the headers than to simply generate it on the fly.  I'd suggest
putting some serious thought in how to generate this code efficiently.  
But I'd also suggest looking into Chris Walshaw's scheme (see the ABC
indexing guide, pp 3--5) which was designed to facilitate searching of
abc files. It works pretty well, and might have its own advantages.

Of course, if it's a one-off project, he can use any field he
chooses.  The I: field would be fine.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] OT: Battle of Aughrim

[John Walsh]

Joe McCool wrote:

My kids and I play the battle of Aughrim something like:


(ABAG) (ABAE) | (ABAG) (ABAE) | (ABAG) (ABAE) | (ABAG) (ABAE) |
((3AGA) ((3AGA) ((3AGA) AE | ((3AGA) ((3AGA) ((3AGA) AE |\
((3AGA) ((3AGA) ((3AGA) AE |
{C/E/F/GA}B3c d3e | d2e2 d2f2 | d2e2 d2f2 | d2e2 d2e2 | Td8 | cBAG HE4 |
(ABAG) (ABAE) | (ABAG) (ABAE) | (ABAG) AE |
((3AGA) ((3AGA) ((3AGA) AE | ((3AGA) ((3AGA) ((3AGA) AE| (GABc) d3e|\
((3AGA) ((3AGA) ((3AGA) AE | ((3AGA) ((3AGA) ((3AGA) AE| (GABc) d3e|\
d3e d2f2| d2e2 d4 | (cBAG) HE4 |]


Phil Taylor wrote:
Searching through my collection of abcs I found that tune in the O'Neil's
project files, complete with its header (makes it a lot easier to work
with :-)

X:1845
T:The Battle Of Aughrim
M:2/4
L:1/16
B:O'Neill's 1845
Z:Transcribed by Bob Safranek, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Z:There is no way to duplicate the notation of the grace notes in bar 8
K:G

[...about the same abc..]


There are some other unusual tunes on that page of O'Neill's:
Ulster Outcry, Leinster Outcry, and he doesn't give attribution for any of
them, which probably means that he picked them up from books, rather than
from someone's playing.  So there's no guarantee that it survived into
this century.  (If anyone has more information on any of these tunes, I'd
be interested.)  There is a related tune, probably even an ancestor, which
was published in Dudley Colclough's Tutor for the Union Pipes (c.a. 1830),
called A Bagpipe Concerto call'd the Battle of Aghrem, or the Football
March. This is a six-part piece---abc included below---which seems to be
a descriptive bagpipe tune---you can just hear the birls.  Here's what
Dennis Brooks wrote about it in Iris na bPiobairi VI, 1986:

The construction of this tune dates it to the end of the
seventeenth century.  Because of its limited range, an octave plus the
lower leading tone, this tune was likely made on the warpipes.  In its
multiple parts, each represents a portion of the actual battle at Aughrim,
July 12, 1690.  This is truly a descriptive piece of music, from the
gathering of forces in the first part to the retreat of the Irish horse in
the last part.

He went on to say that the only other comparable piece of Irish
bagpipe music we have which dates back that far was Alasdruims March,
played at the battle of Knockanos, Kanturk, Co. Cork, in 1647.

There are other tunes and songs connected with that fateful
battle, of course--in addition to the march (sometimes polka) that has
been mentioned.  There's a lovely slow air, the Lament for Aughrim.  The
McPeake Family recorded it as Francis had learned it from his teacher,
John Reilly, first the air, then a march, then the air again.  Quite
moving.  Strangely enough, the march wasn't the Battle of Aughrim, but the
Return from Fingal, which commemorates an earlier Irish battle, a victory
rather than a defeat (it is said it was played by the troops of Brian Boru
returning from the Battle of Clontarf.)

Cheers,
John Walsh

(some of the following lines have been thoughtfully truncated by the
email program.  Shouldn't cause trouble.)

X:1
T:A Bagpipe Concerto call'd the Battle of Aghrem
T:or the Football March 
R:misc
K:C
DDD2 D2D2 DDD2 E2D2|DDD2F2D2 DDD2 G2D2|DDD2 F2D2 DDD2 E2D2|DDD2 GFEF G2C2 
E2D2:|
DDD2 GFEF G2D2 F2D2|DDD2 E2C2G2C2 E2D2|DDD2 B2D2 A2D2 F2D2|DDD2 B2D2 G2C2 
E2D2:|
DDD2 B2D2 DDD2 F2D2|DDD2 B2D2 DDD2 E2D2|DDD2 B2D2 DDD2 d2D2|DDD2 B2D2 DDD2 
E2D2:|
DDD2 dcBc d2D2 F2D2|DDD2 cBAB c2C2 E2D2|d2B2c2A2 B2G2 A2D2|GFEF G2C2 E2D2 
DDD2||
d3B d3A d3B d3D|d3B d3A d3F d3D|d3B A2d2 F2d2 G2D2|BdAd GdFd BdAd GdDd||
FdGd FdEd FdGd EdDd|EdFd GdEd EdFd GdDd|EdFd GdEd EdFd GdDd|EdFd GdEd EdFd 
GdDd||D.C.


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Re: [abcusers] ties, accidentals, enharmonics and part order

[John Walsh]

Apologies for dragging up old threads, but I've been away for a while
jhoerr writes:

What does this prove, except that *your* rules are self-defeating and
incomplete?  If your rules imply a contradiction where even novice
musicians agree on a single interpretation, don't you think maybe the
problem is with how you stated them?


Oddly enough, that occurred to me  While I couldn't find a copy
of Norton's, I did find that but Music Notation by Mark McGrain says

When an accidental not included in the key signature precedes a note,
it affects only that pitch in that octave, for the duration of the entire
measure or until it is cancelled by another accidental,
which is about what I said, and, on the next page, he says

An accidental applies to the full duration of the note that it attends
Which is what you said  Then it goes on to say, Therefore an accidental
should not precede a note that has been tied over from the measure before,
though it must be restated at the first recurrence of that pitch in
the new measure, which I don't remember anyone saying  So in the
old example ^f-|f, apparently it's not only unnecessary to write
^f-|^f, it's actually incorrect  There is an exception---of course---for
a couple of pages later he writes that it is permissible to put a
courtesy accidental on the note after a page-turn, ie if it 
has been tied over from the previous page  

Hmmm

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Re: Folkband

[John Walsh]

Jack Campin writes:

Gilderoy gets around there's probably no other tune in the British
Isles with so many descendants  Gilderoy *means* red haired boy


Unless, of course, it dates all the way back to Gilles de Rais, in
which case it means Bluebeard

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] ties and accidentals

[John Walsh]

This thread keeps going on, but I have the feeling that there has
been agreement for some time, and we've just forgotten it.  But I've often
been wrong on that score before...


Here's what I think has been said: ties and slurs can't always be
distinguished in printed staff notation. The usual convention is that if
there is an ambiguity between tie and slur, one always assumes it's a tie;
in other words, in questions of tie/slur, the default is a tie.

There is no ambiguity in abc---the example ^f- | f has a tie, not
a slur---so that the second f has to be an f sharp.  Which means that
playback and midi programs should play ^f, but printing programs don't
print the accidental (because they don't need to--the convention takes
care of it.)

It would seem to follow---but I don't remember if there was
agreement here---that if one wrote ^f- | ^f that the accidental on the
second f is there for emphasis, and a printing program should print it;
but it should be equivalent to ^f- | f for any midi or playback program,
or for that matter, to a musician reading the tune.

Another question was lightly touched on, but not resolved: if we
add another f to the examples: ^f-| f f and ^f- | ^f f ...what should be
done with the third f? I would think that in the first example, it's an f
natural, in the second, it's an f sharp (since the printing program will
have explicitly sharped the first f in the measure, so by extension, all
later f's will be sharped.)  But I'm guessing---we should just follow
whatever the actual convention is in printed music for this.

John Chambers brought up the question of having software accept
abc's tie notation for a slur.  It seems relatively harmless to me, as
long as it doesn't prevent people from using the tie/slur distinction the
way it's meant to be, but it points out the need for clear
documentation--it's easy to imagine someone using a tie for a slur and
then having no clue as to why some strange accidentals showed up later on
in the measure.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

 From The Norton Manual of Music Notation, First Edition (Heussenstamm,
| 1987):
|
| If a passage is to be repeated from the beginning of a piece, only one

Yup; and there ain't a whole lot  you're  gonna  do  to  fight  this,
unless  you  can somehow get control of all ABC software and add code
to make it illegal.


Nor should one even try.  As has been pointed out, there's a school
of notation out there---Kerr, O'Neill, et. al. which omits initial repeats
because they simply aren't necessary...in that particular music.  Irish and
Scottish dance music, is (uaually) so regular, with such a simple repeat
structure (tunes are divided into parts, each part is played once or twice,
as the case may be, and on to the next) that the algorithm when you hit a
repeat sign, go back to the end of the last part, is sufficient for the
vast majority of the tunes; there's no ambiguity.  For the exceptions, one
can always put in the start-repeats. In fact, most of the old collections
only give the bare bones of the tunes: no decorations, second endings are
skipped, etc., because the musicians who play them were---and are---are
supposed to flesh them out, add gracenotes and variations to taste, and
figure out the correct pickup notes when necessary. (Not entirely dissimilar
to the situation of figured bass in early music, which came up in another
thread.)

It might be interesting to check the old collections to see if those
arranged with piano accompaniment (which would be more for non-trad players)
are more punctilious about begin-repeats.

Just to add a couple of data points to John's list, I checked some
of the works on my shelves for the use of initial repeats.  I'd guess that
most of the Irish collections that omit begin-repeats follow O'Neill.  But
O'Neill himself was very much aware of the significant---and
insignificant--collections preceeding him, so it's quite possible he himself
adopted the convention from Kerr or someone else.  Is there any evidence
that this originated before Kerr?

Anyway:

These used start-repeats:

Geoghegan's Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe, London, ca 1746.  
(Usually ends lines with the double repeat ::)

John Murphy's collection for violin, violincello and pianoforte, 
(Edinburgh, 1809)

Colclough's Tutor for the UP, ca 1830

Scanlon's Gaelic Collection for the violin, (San Francisco, 1930s?)

Roche's collection, 1911

Heather Clarke's Tutor for the UP (1988, the standard UP tutor these
days. She also uses the naked colon to start repeats which begin a line, a
practice probably picked up from Pat Mitchell.)

Ceol Rince na h'Eireann (Breathnach's collection, (Dublin, 1963)

And a couple which were mentioned already:

Cole's (nee Ryan's Mammoth Collection, late 1800s)

Krassen's version of O'Neill's (editorial slag: not significant. 
Krassen corrected O'Neill's errors to make room for his own.)

These ones don't:

Leo Rowsome's UP tutor, Dublin 

Armagh Pipers Club Tutor

Bulmer and Sharpley (Actually, they used begin-repeats for about the 
first ten tunes of volume 1, then stopped.)

Ceol An Phiobaire, (Dublin, 1971--78)  (This is a book of 
transcriptions, and start repeats are occasionally used to get the pickup 
notes right.)


O'Neill also published collections arranged for the piano, which one
might expect to have the begin-repeats spelled out, but the only one I have
at hand is his Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, which doesn't use them.

I also checked the more careful of the modern transcriptions, of
Patsy Tuohey by Mitchell and Small, and of James Morrison, Michael Coleman,
and Paddy Killoran by David Lyth, and, surprise: no begin-repeats...in
fact...no repeats at all.  Evidently musicians of that calibre repeat a part
note-for-note so seldom that repeats aren't worthwhile.  I did find a couple
in in another collection of careful transcriptions, the Dance Music of
Willie Clancy, by Pat Mitchell...tho I had to look hard.  The repeats always
have begin-repeat attached. Interestingly enough, Mitchell contributed a
large number of the tunes in Ceol An Phiobaire, sans start-repeats.  There
are a couple of peculiarities, already remarked in this thread:
begin-repeats which start a staff are marked with a naked colon. The treble
clef sign is only on the first staff of a tune, while the key signature
heads every staff.  When a begin repeat coincides with a barline, and is not
at the start of a tune, they write: heavy double barline, key signature, and
colon in that order. So that every staff after the first starts with a bar
line; then comes the key sig, and after that, the music.)

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Initial repeats

[John Walsh]

Jack Campin writes:

repeat signs are bars,
 I don't think so. At a quick glance, seven out of the first twelve
 tunes in the Northumbrian Piper's Tune Book have repeat symbols that
 don't coincide with bars.

 Strange---I've been writing tunes like this for years, and had never
remarked that my repeats/part ends usually didn't coincide with the end of
bars.  Of course, now you point it out, it's clear--the measure before the
repeat is completed by the pick-up notes of the next--or first, or whatever.  
Duh...

You're right about the unnecessary complication, but the convention in
sources like Kerr's is absolutely clear.  If ABC had a nested-repeat
construction there would be an ambiguity, but that's years away.



Hmm...before even thinking about nested repeats, how about making
segnos and codas work? That's an easier way to handle them. (I have to admit
a great fund of ignorance here: are nested repeats common in serious music?  
Serious not meaning classical, just that someone is seriously expected to
read it---the 64-tunes-per- page example sounds a bit frivolous in this
sense...)  It's easy enough for computers, but nested repeats stretching
over a couple of lines of music sounds like a recipe for disaster for human
performance. Perhaps that's why the segno sign looks so little like the
repeat?  By the way, there are also signs for one-measure and two-measure
repeats; they might make it pretty simple to write out those tunes which are
made up of repeated one and two-bar phrases. (Never tried it, tho.)


You can do wonders of compression with nested repeats.


A Christmas challenge: find the shortest abc for the music to the
Twelve Days of Christmas.  (all verses,  all extensions suggested in this
thread are welcome, of course.)

I just looked that tune up in O'Neill's 1001 (it's #972).  There is
a notational convention there that I really *don't* think we oughta
emulate... read a dotted crotchet as a minim???  For this one, he


Thanks for that!---I hadn't realized that it was also a set dance.  
That *is* a nice little bit of syncopation there.  It's also #299 in the
1850, but that's less interesting: the beats line up too well.

You can do wonders of compression with nested repeats.  There is a
sheet in Murdoch Henderson's manuscripts titled 64 Great Scottish
Reels in A Major, and he gets them all on one side, one line each,
64 lines (the sheet is the size of a folded tabloid page).  There's


Did he save some space by omitting the key signature at 
the head of each tune?  With that title, he could have.

John Chambers writes:
 
BTW, if you want to see really insignificant repeat  signs,  look  at
the Ryan/Cole collection. [ ... ] Of course, this is one of many books that 
uses several repeat conventions.  Not surprising in a large collection.


And perhaps a sign that it was a cut-and-paste job...?


Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] Multiple Endings

[John Walsh]

John Chambers writes:

Going back to || or [| isn't a very good idea.  It's common  practice
to  use double bars to mark the major phrases within a section, and
they are (almost) never used as repeat boundaries. The code should go
back to |:  or the start of the tune. We oughta state this in the ABC
standard docs.  This would both answer the question,  and  make  life
easier for implementers.


There's a backwards-compatibility problem here:  the [| and |]
constructs came relatively late in the life of abc---in abc 1.6, I think,
since my copy of abc2mtex 1.5 chokes on both.  The result is that there are
a lot of tunes out there (well...in my collection, at least;  while I don't
know about anybody else's, it's a pretty safe bet that there are plenty)
which use || instead of |].  Of course I could re-edit most of them by a
global search-and-replace, (at the price of a few unpleasant surprises) but
I don't want to, since I want to be able to print them with my favorite
legacy app.

James Allright writes:

I think it is reasonable to require |: at the start of a repeat section
and issue a warning if it has been missed out. By require, I mean that
a player program might ignore the end repeat if there is no start repeat
and just play once through.  


I can live with that.  However, having the player program go back to
the beginning of a tune whenever there's no begin-repeat would be a serious
bug IMHO.  (And it would be nice to be able to turn the warnings off.  Come
to think of it, that seems like a good general design feature: warnings tell
the user that there's something there which is neither correct nor a
disaster. They're very useful, but if the user--mea culpa--already knows
that that his or her practice is frowned upon, and is pig-headed enough to
insist on using it anyway, the warnings become annoying, and he or she'll be
better-disposed toward the program if it's possible to turn off the source
of annoyance.)

Cheers,
John Walsh  
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Re: [abcusers] I'm still looking for Christmas Music

[John Walsh]

 
 Sessions Northwest by Daniel Craighead wrote:
  
   Does anyone have or know where to find a Celtic or Baroque Christmas
   collection in ABC format?
 
 Hmmm...
 
 Sorry, Daniel, but it seems there's no such collections on the web. I


I'd have replied earlier, but I thought I should wait till after
Thanksgiving to post Christmas tunes :-)

This isn't large enough to be called a collection, but here are a
few Irish tunes for the season, along with some words of explanation.
Actually, I thought I'd put these up somewhere a couple of years ago, but
evidently not.


Cheers,
John Walsh

--THE TUNES
  

Jigs: 

 Christmas Day in the Morning: I first learned this jig from Paddy
Haverty, of Killimor, Co. Galway, who called it Munster Buttermilk. Since I
already played another jig of the name, I just called it Paddy Haverty's.
But some sleuthing in Breathnach's Ceol Rince na hEireann uncovered the fact
that someone else called it Siamsa Mhuilte Farannain--and also--which is the
reason for including it here--Christmas Day in the Morning. It has a lot of
lift--great tune for dancing. It also sounds good when transposed down to D.
(This seems to be a popular title: Aird has a (different) jig of that name,
and there is a Shetland tune with a similar title.)

Oiche Nollag: (Christmas Eve) a single jig version of the reel Boys of
Ballinahinch/Strawberry Blossom.  It's in vol. 1 of Ceol Rince na hEireann.

A Merry Christmas:  I haven't seen this except in O'Neill's. It's a nice
open jig.

Reels:

Christmas Eve: This is often called Tommy Coen's, because (why else?) it was
written by Tommy Coen of Co. Galway. It's a popular session tune, and has
often been recorded--a tune for all seasons, not just Christmas.

How We Spent the Christmas: from O'Neill's collection Waifs and Strays of
Gaelic Melodies.

New Year's Night:  This is also in Waifs and Strays.  O'Neill got it from
the piper Bernard Delaney, and apologized for not having included it in his
earlier collections.  It's better known as the Reel of Bogie these days.  
(A couple of triplets in O'Neill's setting have been changed to rolls---I'm
not sure exactly what Delaney did play there, but it wouldn't have been
those particular triplets, and rolls are a neutral substitute.)

Hornpipe:

The Christmas Hornpipe:  Cute. This is in Coles 1000 Fiddle Tunes/Ryan's
Mammoth.  More of an English than Irish tune by the sound of it.

Airs:

A New Years' Song, Christmas Eve, both from O'Neill's 1850.

Dom Oiche Ud I mBeithil: a Christmas Carol, recorded by the Chieftains.

The Wexford Carol: approximately as played by Drumlin.

John Walsh
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
X:1
T:Christmas Day in the Morning
T:Paddy Haverty's
T:Munster Buttermilk
R:jig
S:Paddy Haverty
Z:Paddy Haverty is a fiddler from Killimor, Co. Galway.  
Z:He called it Munster Buttermilk, but I have a different tune by that name, so
Z:I call it after him.
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:6/8
K:G
|g2g age|d2 B BAB|d2 B BAB|dBA GBd|\
g2g age|d2 B BAB|dBA GAB|ABA G3:|
|d2 e g2 a|b2 b bag|a2a age|g2 g age|\
d2 e g2a|b2 b bag|age deg|aba g3:|

X:2
T:Oiche Nollag
R:single jig
Z:in Ceol Rince na hEireann
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:6/8
Q:3/8=195
K:D
g|f2 A d2 f|e2 d B2 g|f2 A d2 f|{a}g3 a2 g|
f2 A d2f|e2 d B2 c|d2 A B2 G|E2 F D2:|
g|a2 b a2 f| d3 d2 f|g2fe2d|B3 A2 g|
a2ba2f|d2fg2f|e2dc2e|a3 a2:|

X:3
T:Merry Christmas, A
R:jig
S:O'Neill's
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:6/8
K:G
D|GAB AGE|ceg dBG|GAB AGE|FDD DEF|
GAB AGE|ceg dBG|EFG Adc|BGG G2:|
B|d^ce def|gfe dBG|Bcd efg|gbg afd|
(4gaba gfe|dBg dBG|EFG Adc|BGG G2:|

X:4
T:Christmas Eve
T:Tommy Coen's
R:reel
C:Tommy Coen
Z:By T. Coen, of Co. Galway.
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:C|
K:G
GE|D3 E ~G3 A|B2 dB ABGB|ABGE ~D3 E|G2 BG ABGE|
~D3 E GFGA|B2 dB ABGA|BA ~A2 GEBG| ABGE G3:|
A|BA (3Bcd edeg|agge g2 eg|a2 ge gage|dedB ABGA|
BA (3Bcd edeg|agge g2 eg|a2 ge d2 BG| ABGE G2:|
dc|BG ~G2 dGBd|eg ~g2 egdc|BG ~G2 dGBG|EA ~A2 EA ~A2|
BG ~G2 dGBd|eggf ~g3 a|bgag edBG|ABGE G2:|

X:5
T:How We Spent the Christmas
R:reel
S:O'Neill's Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody; from Francis O'Neill.
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:C|
K:D
df|eA (3AAA BG (3GGG|(3AGA fe dB (3BBB|eA (3AAA BG (3GGG|Agfe d2:|
de|trfdfa trfdfa|edef dB B2|1trfdfa trfdfa|edeg d2 :|2 ABAF 
ABdf|afef d2||

X:6
T:New Year's Night
R:reel
S:O'Neill's Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody.  From the piping of Bernard Delaney.
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:C|
K:G
gf|eA ~A2 edBd|(3efg dB GABd|eA ~A2 edBc|d2 ef g2 z f|
eA ~A2 edBd|(3efg dB GABd|edef gfga|gedB A2||
BA|G2 Bd g2 ge|dedBd2 BA|G2 Bd g2 af|gedB AcBA|
G2 Bd g2 ge|dedB dega|bgag (3efg fa|gedB A2||

X:7
T:Christmas Hornpipe, The
R:hornpipe
S:Coles 1000 Fiddle Tunes
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:2/4
K:Bb
FE|DF B4 FE|DF B,4 FD|CE c2 cdcB|Ac F4 cd|
edef gebg|dcde fdbf|egce AcFA| B2 d2 B2:|
FE|DFBF GFED|ECcB AGFE|DFBd edcB|AcBG F2FG|
AGAB c=Bcd|edef g2 (3fed|fbdf BdFA|B2 d2 B2:|

X:8
T:New Year's Song
R:air
S:O'Neill's 
Z:John Walsh Dec 99
M:6/8

Re: [abcusers] tempo

[John Walsh]

Laurie's suggestion seems to take care of most of the tempoish
things you'd want to ask a printing or playback program to do, except...how
do you ask it *not* to print the tempo?

Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] something really simple

[John Walsh]

Anselm Lignau writes:

Yes, but the whole point of Jack's original proposal was for people to
be able to define the meanings of these terms themselves, in a manner
appropriate to the music they were working with. The suggestion to
hard-code a selection of `tempo terms' (a bad one, IMHO) came from
elsewhere, quite a bit later.


I interpreted those as suggestions for possible default values which
could be easily overridden by the user.

Some programs (abcmus for sure, and judging by other comments in
this thread, Barfly, probably others too) use the R: and M: fields to
determine the tempo (and, more, a stress program) which can be modified by
the user as desired. It's a great feature. I think of the translation of
allegro into beats per minute as an extension of this.

Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] dynamics

[John Walsh]

Richard Robinson writes:

Taral writes:
 and  operators:
The  operator will be used for splits into 2 voices in a single
measure, thus:

 |F2A2BcF2c2bc|

 Is this the same syntax that abc2mtex used to use ? And, is there much abc
 out there that uses it ? I used to have a few, I _think_ I've migrated
 them all to use the newer and easier V: - being 2-part all the way. This
 coud well make it easier to drop an extra voice in for just a few
 measures, but backwards-compatability issues can be a pain ...


I'm also curious as to whether this was ever used enough to raise
any worries about backward compatibility.  Abc2mtex does use this syntax to
write multi-staff music.  I think it was just an experiment, and as far as I
know it was never part of the standard, and was never adopted by another
program.  I tried it once or twice, and it worked on the very simple stuff I
fed it, but I found it hard to use, and, above all, *very* difficult to
proofread and correct.  The problem is that one often needs several 's in a
measure, especially with more than two staves, and it gets quite finicky to
disentangle the abc in order to figure out which staff a given note is
supposed to be on, or to find a note which needs to be corrected.  I thought
it would be much easier if one had a pre-processor which would take the
present abc multistaff notation and put in the ampersands to feed to
abc2mtex.  This would give it a more user-friendly multi-staff capability,
and avoid the need to write 's in the abc.

Cheers,
John  Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] ghostnotes

[John Walsh]

Atte writes:

Is it possible in abcm2ps, which I'm running, to notate ghostnotes, either
with the note in ( and ), with a cross for note head or as a smaller 
note?


I doubt it's possible in abcm2ps at the minute. It comes down to
changing the note-head font on demand, which might be a useful feature to
think about.

It turns out that all three of your suggestions can be done in
abc2mtex, tho.  This may not do you any good, since abc2mtex doesn't support
voices or multi-staves, which you probably need for jazz transcriptions.  
But it _is_ possible to do it---to a certain extent, at least.

I put some examples below to show how it can be done; the necessary
TeX macros are right above the example that uses them.  Warning: I haven't
tested these macros on anything but these examples, so I don't know how
generally they work.

The first example uses small noteheads.  

To make a note with a small head, when you type out the abc, type
T in front of the note, and an N after, (T for tiny and N for normal
noteheads.)  This basically changes the font to small note heads, then
changes it back. There is also a \smallnotesize command, which you can use
in place of \tinynotesize for slightly larger note heads.  There is a
limitation to this, tho---it doesn't work in chords, which may be where you
need it, for, as far as I can tell, all of the notes in a chord have the
same notehead size.

This example should show small note-heads for the g in the first
measure and the two E's in the second.

For notes in chords, the prens notation is a better bet.  (Matter of
fact, it seems to work better all around.) In the second example, just type
a P (for prens) in front of the ghostnote.  The g in the first measure, the
E in the second, and the e in the third should be in prens.  Apologies for
the outdated chord notation; I'm still using version 1.5; change +..+ to
[..] if you wish.

(This will look bad if there's an accidental in front of the note,
tho. There should be a separate macro to use on notes with accidentals--it's
just a matter of moving the left-hand pren a little to miss the accidental
sign, but I was too lazy to write it.)

The third example writes the two D's in the first measure and the G
in the second with x-heads.  It essentially does the same thing as example
1:  changes the note-head font, and changes it back, but MusixTeX doesn't
treat it as a font change so it's a bit trickier to do than example 1.  
(And, frankly, I'm cheating: what I did *only* works with quarter notes.  
I'm sure it's possible to do it in general, but it may be pretty ugly, since
it would involve redefining a bunch of MusixTeX commands and then restoring
their definitions.  Might be worthwhile to actually work it out, since it
could be used for writing percussion lines.) But anyway, in this example,
you get the x-head by typing X immediately before the ghostnote, Y after.  
(For a different x-head, uncomment the two lines with percents in front.)

Cheers,
John Walsh

---EXAMPLES-
Run abc2mtex -x on the following, and run it thru
TeX to see how these look.  Those definitions above the second
example may be wrapped by the emailer; they should each be on one line.

\normalmusicsize
\def\userTl#1{\tinynotesize}
\def\userTu#1{\tinynotesize}
\def\userNl#1{\normalnotesize}
\def\userNu#1{\normalnotesize}
\def\userN{\normalnotesize}

X:1
T:Small Notes
M:C
K:G
GDDE GTgNed|eTENed BAGTEN||


\font\pfont=cmr10
\def\userPu#1{\zcharnote{#1}{\raise-.3em\hbox{\pfont{\kern-5pt(\kern 8pt) 
\def\userPl#1{\zcharnote{#1}{\raise-.3em\hbox{\pfont{\kern-5pt(\kern 8pt)
%%
%%THe two \def's above should each be on one line
%%

X:2
T:Notes in Prens
M:C
K:G
GDDE GPged|e+PEe+ed PBAG+PeE+N||

\input musixper.tex
\let\quaru=\qu
\let\quarl=\ql
%\let\doqu=\xqu
%\let\doql=\xql
\def\userXu#1{\let\qu=\doqu \let\ql=\doql}
\def\userXl#1{\let\ql=\doql \let\ql=doql}
\def\userYu#1{\let\qu=\quaru\let\ql=\quarl}
\def\userYl#1{\let\qu=\quaru\let\ql=\quarl}
\def\userY{\let\qu=\quaru\let\ql=\quarl}


X:3
T:X-Heads
M:C
L:1/4
K:G
G XD D YE |XGY g e d|e E e d||
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Re: [abcusers] Susato's Danseryes

[John Walsh]

Jack Campin writes:

But the problem isn't with text processors,it's with brainless 
transfer agents that don't convert terminators in
text files properly.  


I have a bunch of files that I've transferred between Unix and Dos, and
edited on both, so they have some line endings from each. (And it'll get
worse if I ever get that Mac notbook...)  There must be a lot of other
people who do the same, so mixed line endings may not be that uncommon. Most
editors these days seem to handle it gracefully, so one tends not to
notice---I usually have to open a file in vi to make sure---but I don't know
that you can always blame the transfer agents for not picking it up.

Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] Susato work planning

[John Walsh]

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Re: [abcusers] gracenote extensions

[John Walsh]

Jack Campin writes:

  a useful function when notating music for stopped bagpipes, like
  uillean or Northumbrian pipes; with these you have a choice of whether
  to play legato or introduce a momentary silence by putting all your
  fingers down.  In practice people use slurs for this, but if I were
  trying to write down the sort of tricks Dick Hensold uses I might want
  more options.  Perhaps it might also serve to represent string damping


Pat Mitchell and Jackie Small, in their transcriptions of Patsy
Tuohey's piping (uilleann pipes), use a comma (breathmark) to indicate
those places where the chanter is closed, but the note is not quite
staccato. It's a delicate distinction which only comes up when you're
trying to capture the fine points of a particular performance, but I've
found it useful.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] RE :There is a dumb man... downloading software

[John Walsh]

Gianni Cunich writes:

In fact the statement I made about the abc transcriptions was that, 
in a number of cases, the transcriptions had to be either non faithful 
to the source or non abc standard compliant (an in some cases in fact 
they're both). A different statement, and a rather more articulated 
one for the matter, that Eric intended.  And, as shown by the fact 
that nobody else actually has been so naive to argue about that issue, 
I wasn't expressing an opinion. I was jut talking about a matter
of fact. Anybody who will take the care to have look at the real 
source book will be able to verify it! ;-).


It's not clear to me whether this is a question of the standard or
of the implementation. All the tunes could have been pretty faithfully
reproduced at that time by abc2mtex, with the exception, perhaps, of the
Irish tune names (I'm not sure if there's an uncial font available in TeX.  
If there is, someone tell me where to find it.  I never got Eirannach to
work.) One just has to use the letters H--Z (which Phil Taylor calls
re-definable symbols, because that's what they are, and which I call
user-definable macros for the same reason.)  It's just a matter of writing
the necessary TeX/MusixTeX macros, and, although I didn't actually go the
the length of writing them down, I didn't notice anything that couldn't
have been done that way. Certainly mordents, turns, emphasis marks,
crescendo/decrescendo hairpins, tr, ff, pp, D.C., segnos, turns with
sharps stacked over them etc are all straightforward. However, the
transcriptions were for abc2ps, which doesn't support H--Z, so this wasn't
an option.

Since Chris wrote the standard (i.e. version 1.6) pretty much as a
description of what abc2mtex could do, it's hard to say those are not in
the standard.  In the other hand, what the standard _does_ say about H--Z
is about as vague as it can be (it just says that users can use them to
define new notation) because, as Chris says, they are extremely
package-dependent, and, as he doesn't say, because, while their
implementation is trivial in abc2mtex, it is extremely difficult in other
packages like abc2ps.

I plead guilty to writing some of the non-compliant (but not, I
hope, non-faithful) transcriptions. I did this quite intentionally, hoping
somebody would notice, take the hint, and see that this capability is
needed.  Thanks for noticing, at least.
 
John Chambers wrote:

One  of the strangest is the practice of putting a fermata over 
a bar line.  It's not really  obvious  what  this  was  intended  
to  mean.

It means Fine.  Big fat period at the end of a sentence. This was one of
the ones that gave me a little pause when I claimed I can write macros for
all of O'Neill's stuff. While I'm sure I can write a macro to do it, I'm
not sure if I can do that and *also* write the bar line in the abc.  I'd
have to look it up in the Musixtex docs.



There is a dumb man that tells to a deaf man: Hey, there's a blind man 
looking at you!.
Popular Italian joke.


...said the blind carpenter as he picked up his hammer and saw.
Popular American joke.

Cheers,
John Walsh


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Re: [abcusers] accents and other signs

[John Walsh]

Phil Taylor writes:

...the letters can be
used for things other than single symbols, e.g.

   U: I = start crescendo, i = end crescendo
in order to start a crescendo hairpin which may extend across several
notes, and which is ended when i is typed.

Exactly.


Excellent!

OK!  Presumably then a future version of abc2mtex

Don't I wish!

which supported
redefinable symbols could simply do so in most cases by just substituting
single letters for one another?


I'm not sure I understand the question.  Abc2mtex actually does no
substitution at all.  It handles these very simple-mindedly.  The
way it works is that abc2mtex reads the abc and writes out a file for TeX
to process.  When it comes across one of the letters H--Z, say S, in the
abc, it simply writes \userS in the output file. The user then redefines
\userS to be whatever TeX macro is wanted, and puts the re-definition
where it's accessible (often in an auxiliary file called header.tex).  
The macro substitution is all done in the bowels of TeX.  This
re-definition is exactly equivalent Barfly's definition in the U: field, I
think. (Example: the abc2mtex user wants a segno, and puts an S in the abc
at the desired place.  Then the user re-defines it:

\def\userS{\Segno}

in the header.tex file, (\Segno is the TeX macro for the segno sign) and
there will be a nice big segno sign in the printed music. If I understand
correctly, the Barfly user will write exactly the same abc, except that
there will be an entry in the U: field:

U: S = segno

and the printed result is the same, but this time the substitution is 
done in the bowels of Barfly.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] accents and other signs

[John Walsh]

Phil Taylor writes:

BarFly also supports macros, which are quite different in that they
allow the user to define anything that can be expressed in abc text.
It is not the case (as suggested in the draft standard) that U: is
used for staff notation and macros for playing.  The critical difference
is that symbols defined using U: invoke a piece of code to draw or
play something and can only be used if the developer has written
that code into the program, while macros simply substitute one bit
of abc text for another before the tune is parsed, and the user can use
this for purposes which the developer may not have anticipated.


Aha!  So when you speak of redefinable symbols, you mean H--Z
rather than the symbols they (may) stand for? So that the letters can be
used for things other than single symbols, e.g.

U: I = start crescendo, i = end crescendo

in order to start a crescendo hairpin which may extend across several
notes, and which is ended when i is typed. Or, if one wished to write a
cadenza or other passage in small notes,

U: K = small notesize, k = normal notesize

and then type 

K ABcdef k 

for the passage.  (Always assuming, of course, that the code has been
written for these.  By the way, doesn't the (proposed) standard permit
both upper and lower case letters, except for a couple, like z, which are
already assigned?  That's useful for start/end markers, as above, as well
as giving twice as many characters---the 19 extra characters may sound
like a lot, but in fact it's all to easy to run out, once you start using
them.)

The distinction between macros and symbols is valid, but can lead
to misunderstandings since it is package dependent---it depends on exactly
what code has been written and is accessible.  With packages like MusixTeX
and Lilypond, the code has already been written, and is directly
accessible, so there is a *lot* of flexibility in the U: field.  To add to
the confusion, commands in TeX are called macros, so if you use the
letters H--Z in abc2mtex, they actually represent macros in TeX. (Repeat:
macros in *TeX*, not in abc.)

Cheers,

John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] intonation - Fomula for determining a half step in

[John Walsh]

I wrote:

(...)This effectively means that they are in some kind of just tuning:
 the ratio of the frequency of each note to the drone frequency is a 
simple
 fraction with fairly low denominator. (...) It's close to the even 
tempered
ale for the fifth
 and third, not so close with the second, for instance.  (15-17 cents

And Simon Wascher replied:

I disagree strongly! the just third is quite far from the equaltempered. 
and the fifth is really different too.


Sorry, I was going from memory, and had the second and third
reversed.  Here is the table someone posted to the UP list.  (Made up, I
am sure, with a hand calculator, not a tuner on a set of real pipes.)  
Anyway, the second is reasonably close and the third is not, as you say,
but the fifth on the other hand is quite close. (There's an interesting
choice for the G#: the two possibilities differ by 35 cents.)

NoteJust Ratio (to D)Equal tempered fraction   Difference in cents
----   -
D   1:1  1.00  0
D#  16:151.0595+12
E   9:8  1.1225+4
Fnat6:5  1.1892+16 (!)
F#  5:4  1.2599-14
G   4:3  1.3348-2
G#  7:5 or 10:7  1.4142-17 or +18
A   3:2  1.4983+2
A#  8:5  1.5874+14
B   5:3  1.6818-16
Cnat9:5  1.7818+18
C#  15:8 1.8878-12
D   2:1  2.0


Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] Fomula for determining a half step in MgHz...

[John Walsh]

In fact, the even tempered scale hasn't completely taken over. The
uilleann pipes are usually tuned against the drones, and I imagine that is
also true of the highland pipes and other instruments like the vielle 
which have drones.  This means
that when voicing the instrument, makers adjust the pitch of the note
on the chanter to make them blend well with the drones.  (More exactly,
they adjust the drone pitch until it sounds right with the given note on
the chanter.  The amount the drone had to go up is the amount the chanter
will have to come down.)

This effectively means that they are in some kind of just tuning:
the ratio of the frequency of each note to the drone frequency is a simple
fraction with fairly low denominator.  (Or quite close---the overtones
have quite a bit to do with the blend, and they're almost never exactly in
harmonic ratios with the fundamental, so there's probably a small tuning
adjustment for that.)  It's close to the even tempered scale for the fifth
and third, not so close with the second, for instance.  (15-17 cents
difference, as I remember.(?)) With this kind of tuning, even the interval
D-E sounds reasonable.  (Try that on a piano.)  It's common to play an E
minor tune over a D drone, and pipers love to play with the C note against
the D drone.

After playing the pipes for a number of years, I find that the
piano, played solo or with an orchestra, sounds correct, but, when I hear
it played along with a set of pipes, it sounds very much in-your-face and
definitely off.  Guitars are much better, since their attack isn't quite
so brash.  (Of course, the pianist mistakenly thinks that the pipes are
off...:-)

Cheers,
John Walsh




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Re: [abcusers] problems with the R: field

[John Walsh]

Phil Taylor writes:

I think a lot of people find it very useful, although I agree that it
would be nice to have an interchange format for stress programs.


And John Chambers writes

Something that I've thought could be useful in a player: People using
them  to  learn tunes could benefit from a basic sort of "style" list
that would modify tunes to fit a style. The point here would be to do
the standard, stereotypical things of that style. It's not a tool for
producing masterful music without human intervention; it's a tool for
helping novices learn the basics of a style. Most musical styles have
a lot of things that  are  conventionally  done,  often  without  the
musicians being very aware of what they're doing.  Incorporating such
things into a player could lead to a good teaching tool.


I think these are very good ideas.  If there were a standard
format for writing stress programs, and if someone cobbled together a GUI
to make them easy to write, then people would be able to produce--for
instance--tutorials for various styles for distribution on the
internet.  ("This is how a roll on G should sound ~G Here it is in a
reel |DG~G2 BG~G2|cAFA dBcA|... .  Press the slow-the-decorations button
to hear how the notes should be formed..."  And even--there's no reason
not to be ambitious--- "This is the way the two-three slur in Sligo-style
bowing sounds...FAuAB AFvED|...")  This wouldn't be as good as having an
instructor, or even an instructional video, but it would be better than
the written word alone, and would be compact, easily available, and
useful for a learner isolated from good instruction, as is (too) often the
case.  Now that I think of it, if I ever get my hands on a Bulgarian
gaida, I'll be looking for something like this...

Cheers,
John Walsh  
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Re: [abcusers] problems with the R: field

[John Walsh]

Jack Campin writes:

The R: field is long due for deprecation.  There is no standard
list of what rhythms it covers and what to do with them, and nobody
seems interested in making it extensible in any way that would allow
different users to agree on what their extensions mean.  Why not
just let it die so that the name can be reused for something more
important and more definable?


 Actually, it's used very effectively by Abcmus and (I think) a couple
of other player programs to give tunes the proper accent and swing. It
makes them a lot easier to listen to. It uses the tune type and meter to
figure out the primary and secondary beats for emphasis, and does things
with the relative length of notes to get closer to what a human might
play. If you replace R:hornpipe with R:reel in the header of a hornpipe,
it'll come out sounding like a reel (well, somewhat) and vice-versa.

 The list of tune-types is user-extensible, and the style for each
tune-type can be defined in detail: you can adjust it to play the phrase
|ABcd| anywhere between straight and |ABcd| (or, for military-style
bagpiping, even further).  I'm sure you could set it up to play
middle-Eastern types too. This feature is designed for control of the
rhythm, and I don't think it's possible (yet) to use it to define
quarter-tone scales for specific tune-types, but I know there is support
for them somewhere in the program: I had a couple of tunes come out
sounding *very* strange: I was using a Q for some special purpose, and it
turned out Henrik had a default which made the notation QA play the A a
quarter-tone flat!  So...hey!  ask Henrik!

John Chambers writes,

Something that I've thought could be useful in a player: People using
them  to  learn tunes could benefit from a basic sort of "style" list
that would modify tunes to fit a style. The point here would be to do
the standard, stereotypical things of that style. It's not a tool for
producing masterful music without human intervention; it's a tool for
helping novices learn the basics of a style. 


Check out abcmus...

Cheers,
John


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[abcusers] V: and w: for abc2mtex

[John Walsh]

For anyone interested in updating the abc2mtex code
to include multistaff music, voices, and lyrics---or who is even vaguely
curious about the question: check out Source Forge, in 

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/contrib/musixtex/?cvsroot=abc.

This contains a discussion of the problem of implementing V: and
w: for abc2mtex, some preliminary suggestions for algorithms, and a
collection of examples involving  multi-staff/lyrics.

My feeling after doing this was that it looked quite hopeful,
tho probably challenging (nothing involving MusixTeX is a slam-dunk!)
and that one could even make a temporary workaround by writing a 
pre-processor to the present version of abc2mtex.


The examples are given in both abc and MusixTeX code.  The
musixTeX code is fairly heavily commented to make it accessible to someone
who knows a just a little about TeX and MusixTeX. (I make no claims about
the quality of the abcs---I was learning to use abcm2ps as I wrote
them---but the MusixTeX code is there to show what the music is supposed
to look like.)  The abc uses the abcm2ps conventions on voices.  Some of
the examples might be useful for abc test suites, quite apart from
abc2mtex.

The main file is multiv2.txt, which contains both the text and the
examples.  The examples themselves are also in separate files. My thanks
to Laura Conrad for putting it on Source Forge.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] V: again

[John Walsh]

Phil Taylor wrote:

John Walsh wrote:
[...]
M:3/8 L:1/8
F3|FFF|F3|FFF|F3|FFF|F3|FFF|F3|FFF|F3|FFF:|

Surely the third voice is half as long again as the other two?
If it were written like this it would be OK:
 [...]
V:3
M:3/8
L:1/8
F3|FFF|F3|FFF|F3|FFF|F3|FFF:|

No--there was a mistake in the part, but it wasn't that. (I just
forgot a double bar line.) The original piece had twelve bars of 3/8 time
in parallel with 6 of 2/4 and four of 3/4, with no tempo markings.  (This
is copied directly from the MusixTeX docs, by the way.)  Presumably the
musicians playing it would figure out the relative tempos by seeing which
notes lined up in the three staves. This was why I was thinking that some
sort of a tab stop before the double bar-lines (there should have been a
double bar ending the sixth measure in the third voice) would tell the
program to align the double bars, and give it a fighting chance to get the
proper notes aligned elsewhere. I have no idea what to tell a player
program to get it to play back as intended, tho.

(Sorry, James, I misunderstood your proposal: I was thinking about
tab stops at the time and thought you wanted to force voices to align at a
certain point, rather than to recognize the fact that they were aligned.)

I think it's a pretty safe prediction that whatever the V:  
standard turns out to be, it'll be abused much as (and for the same good
reasons) the guitar chord mechanism is now:  i.e. to write something that
abc wasn't explicitly designed to do, but *can be made to do*. (That's
called "hacking," isn't it?  Maybe it'd be a good idea to design in little
hackability in the first place instead of worrying about how much abc
hacking's been done.)

I've been going thru the MusixTeX docs, looking for examples of
multi-staff music in order to see what has to be done to give abc2mtex
multi-staff capability, and I ran into couple of examples which had
isolated chords with notes of different lengths:  e.g. three quarter notes
and one dotted quarter note.  If abc requires all notes in a chord to have
the same duration (the 1.7.6 standard doesn't say that explicitly, but it
seems to be assumed) then you could hack the extra note with an additional
voice. If that's the only place in the piece that happens, you have to put
in a lot of invisible rests!  (Or could you use V:sync right after that
note?)  Even tho the extra note comes from an internal voice in the music,
this still strikes me as a slight abuse of the voice mechanism.  And an
inelegant one, at that.  Or...is this perhaps one of the things J-F
Moine's floating voice was designed for?

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] abc2ps?

[John Walsh]

 A more focused (and less loaded) question: the developer of abc2ps included
 an "R" (roll) command which puts a cap-like symbol over a note.  Is this in
 fact a standard notation in some form of music I don't know about?  Or am I
 assuming that his roll is percussion related, when in fact it applies to some
 other instrument(s)?
 
 The reason I'm asking, is that if this is a completely useless notation symbol,
 then I would propose to the developer(s) that it be replaced by something more
 useful - for me, anyway.
 
   - Chris

In Irish dance music, the roll is a standard decoration--actually 
a standardized way to play either two or three melody notes. (Exactly how 
it's played depends on the instrument playing it---fiddles and accordions
play rolls quite differently.) 

Since Breanann Breathnach's time, the usual notation for this is a
kind of cap over the note, but early implementations of abc put a twiddle
over the note instead, so that's probably the more standard notation in
the abc world now.  Abc2ps has a choice in the C-code: I think it's
"DECO_IS_ROLL" which you can set to zero or one before compiling to get
the behavior you want: that is, when the abc is "BE ~E2", it controls
whether you get the roll sign over the E2 or the twiddle.  Some
implementations of abc use RE2 to denote roll, ~E2 to get the twiddle.

My own feeling is that the twiddle denotes a turn, which is quite
different from a roll, and I want "~E2" to come out with the roll sign
over the E2, not the twiddle.  Else it breaks a couple of MB's of my
abc's, and rather than replace the twiddles by R's in all my files, I'd
rather simply use a program which can be configured to interpret the roll
correctly.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] accidentals in ()

[John Walsh]

Laura Conrad writes:

 John seems that some people here are saying that in some cases cautionary
 John accidentals ARE musically significant.  

No, I think what we're saying is that cautionary accidentals are easy
to confuse with editorial accidentals, which *are* musically
significant. 

In my case, it's one of the things that makes lilypond easier to use
for my purposes than ABC -- I'm not willing to enter editorial
accidentals into my transcriptions unless I can distinguish them from
the ones in my sources.  


Let's see if I understand the problem.  There seem to be several
different forms of accidentals, such as editorial accidentals and
cautionary accidentals, which are played differently, but are the same on
sheet music.  (Or conversely, there are forms, e.g. ordinary and
cautionary, which are played the same way but appear differently on sheet
music.)  We would like to have all of these kinds in abc.  But we don't
have a great amount of unclaimed notation to spare.

 To me, this would seem to be a good place for user-defined
symbols. If there were a construct, say !accidentals_in_prens! built into
abc, one could use the U: field to assign it to one of the free
characters H--Z. That is, one could write, say, 
U:P=!accidental_in_prens!
for instance, and then, whenever such an accidental came up, just
write P before it. 

 The advantage here is that something like !accidental_in_prens!
only appears in the headers and doesn't need as compact a notation as
something which appears in the abc: it only uses existing notation
in the tune body. If one wants to distinguish between cautionary and
editorial accidentals (which I gather are similar on sheet music) one
can also define U:Q=!accidental_in_prens! and then write Q before
the editorial accidentals, P before the cautionary accidentals, and
thereby preserve the difference in the abc source. (The difference in
playback can be taken care of in the m: field.) 

 The same thing could be done for optional notes mentioned earlier
in this thread, which are sometimes written in parentheses. That is, one
could build in something like !note_in_prens! and assign it a letter
in the U: field.

I haven't checked, but I think this can already be done in
abc2mtex by writing a couple of musictex macros.  It is certainly the
first thing I'd try if I needed it.

 HmmmI foresee someone objecting that if we have something as
clumsy as !accidental_in_prens! around, people will use it in the body of
the tune instead of the header. I doubt it'll happen often, but one could
avoid it entirely by decreeing that commands enclosed by, say, double
bangs, e.g. !!foo!!, can only be used in headers, and not in the tune
body, and use that convention for these additional commands.

Cheers,
John Walsh

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[abcusers] Tuplets

[John Walsh]

A triplet in abc2mtex is written (3abc; in abc2ps, it's
((3abc)---the slur has to be put in explicitly.  (Technically, I don't
think it's a slur--it's just a grouping symbol to catch the eye, and it's
often denoted with an angular slur, instead of the usual curvy one.

Question: do people ever write triplets without that slur mark?
(Silly question--we're talking about music, so of course, *someone's*
bound to do it.)  But is it common? I often use abc2mtex, and have to
re-edit tunes each time I want to print them out in abc2ps.  It would be
handy if ((3abc) and (3abc were considered to be equivalent.

In fact, both notations have a practical drawback: they unbalance
the parentheses.  The compromise notation (3abc) would have the advantage
of balancing the parentheses, allowing one to use the brace-matching
present on lots of text editors to check for runaway slurs. (I seem to
remember starting some slurs that ended ten tunes later...:-)

Cheers,
John Walsh

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Re: [abcusers] abc2ps and early ornament signs

[John Walsh]

Laura Conrad writes:

   John For my money, the MusixTeX output is as good as or better
   John than abc2ps, and you can do a lot more with the formatting.
   John There's no problem producing PS or EPS files from it.

Has anyone done anything about adding w: or V: fields to abc2mtex?  I
agree with this statement, but I do very little that doesn't use one
or the other or both.


 I don't believe so. I think Chris was originally waiting until
MusixTeX settled down to add to abc2mtex (MusixTeX was changing so
fast at one time that it was like hitting a moving target. Now that it has
settled down, I'm hoping that he or some other kind soul will bring
the program up to date as part of the Source Forge project. (MusixTeX
has support for multiple staffs, voices, and lyrics, so they're there
for abc2mtex to use. They're a bit tricky tho, so it might take some
figuring out to actually implement them.) At any rate, it would be a
pity for such a powerful program to be allowed to languish. 

 On that subject, MusixTeX seems to be all too settled these days.
Does anyone know if Daniel Taupin is still working on it? I took a quick
look at some files in CTAN, and the latest seemed to be ca 1996. 

 By the way, the tilde (~) is used by TeX in about the same way as
by abc2ps---i.e. as a non-printing space---tho it also has some other
functions, such as preventing unwanted line-breaks in certain
situations. 

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] Re: O'Neill errors

[John Walsh]

Frank Nordberg wrote:

 A problem with the O'Neill tunes is that many of them doesn't
 seem to have a clearly defined tonal centre at all.

Ah, that's interesting.  I think it's one of the great interests
of the tunes, rather than a problem, but of course Frank's talking about
notational questions, not musical interest here.

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 

and I realize I am in the minority on this, but I continue to feel
that the K: field should describe the number of sharps or flats
without naming a tonic and/or a mode.


 Well, if you'll amend that to "...the K: field should *be able* to
describe the number of sharps or flats without naming a tonic and/or mode"
you might not be in the minority. At least you wouldn't be alone, for I'd
agree. But I think it should also be able to describe the tonic and/or
mode, along with a quite few other possibilities.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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