I think we're scaring the newcomers.
That worries me too. We could take this discussion somewhere
else if necessary - it's not really about abc per se. Any
newcomers like to comment? Or alternatively somebody post
some tunes so this isn't the only thread in town :-)
Lemme try to do both.
ade
public.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 6604760 fax 0870 0554975 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food
intolerance data recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts, and Scot
I agree that installation is an important part of software
development. Ideally, this would be an ABC *users* mailing list...
Well, users oughta get to grumble about what developers give them.
My pet hate is excessive automation. I DO NOT want the process of
installing system-critical
Incidentally, I would like to see a 'class' code, that would include one or
more characters, each of which would represent a class of music to which
the tune belongs. Then, if there is a large archive of tunes, you can pipe
it through a filter to extract all those in the archive that belong to
For those living outside the UK, Lewes and several other towns in
south-east England have had severe flooding over the last few days.
I posted this to uk.music.folk to mark the occasion - Marjorie Clarke
(nearby but not flooded) said she'd pass it on to someone at the Lewes
folk club, dunno if
I would like to see in BarFly is a "Save as standard abc" menu
command. A text file would be saved (and displayed) that preserves
as much of the active file as possible without using any features
not found in the current standard. V: lines and whatever else
would either be stripped or
I have had an ambition to cross an ocean under sail for
many years. I am now going to attempt to do it. [...]
It isn't safe to leave much sooner; you have to wait
for the hurricane season(*) to end.
Here's something to sing on the way. It comes from a daily
music broadside periodical
gets() is only used in one place (in the original abc2ps code, at that).
Where it is used is in the interactive function and it is used to get user
input to select tunes. The buffer is 500+ characters, and it's *highly*
unlikely that the user is going to enter more characters than that.
-piper
wants to use the same music). Semantically these are all different
and ABC ought to represent them differently.
I agree with Laura that ABC-to-staff-notation software ought to allow
for alternate conventions in representing these constructs.
---
What Ted is suggesting is more or less what the Cornell Synthesiser
Generator was designed for; give it a lexis and an attribute grammar
and it'll build you a lexer, parser and structure editor. (I once
supervised a student implementing an analogue of the CSG in a higher-
order persistent
What do the Dead Sea Scrolls sound like in abc?? :-)
There seems an obvious musical interpretation of the apocryphal Gospel
of Thomas (from the Nag Hammadi collection):
They said to Him, "Shall we then, as children, enter the Kingdom?"
Jesus said to them,
Original
Developers are *not* the only people who get a say in what ABC ought
to be, or what it should be used for.
O yes they are! all the Linux software for abc is FREE, so I think
nobody has the right to ask the `developers' to do ANYTHING. - without
paying them that is!
The point is that
Well giving them software that produces "abc" that is inconsistent with
any other abc isn't exactly doing them favours is it?
BarFly doesn't produce ABC, the user does. It's a text editor that
*can* create ABC but doesn't impose any structure at all on the
documents it produces.
Thank God.
But what about the use of ! as a delimeter in 1.7.6.
The potential conflict with abc2win code can be resolved fairly easily
in the parser by looking forward to see if an ! is at the end of a line
or not.
Yes, but what does abc2win do with an exclamation mark in the middle
of a line?
From
If you read the 1.6 spec carefully, what it says is that the
things called "global accidentals" are to be drawn before all the
notes in the tune. It says "... for example, K:D =c would write the
key signature as two sharps (key of D) but then mark every c as
natural " It also states
I quoted this tune, and its bagpipe origin, as an example of where
key signatures that allow for different pitches in different octaves
might be handy:
X:1
T:Oh I Hae Seen the Roses Blaw
M:6/8
L:1/8
K:G =f ^F % low F's sharp, high F's natural
D|G2G BAB|c2A F2D|GAG B2c|d2g d2c|B2c d2e|f2d
I think there are already examples where extra information
may need to be added in order to make abc unambiguous. A simple
example is making | Ac Bd | sound a little more like |Ac Bd |
simply by adding R:hornpipe to the header.
except that hornpipes aren't always played dotted. You
guitar chord = silence|chord
silence = X
chord = root[modifier][/bass]
root = note
bass = note
note = note letter[accid]
note letter = A|B|C|D|E|F|G
accid = #|b
modifier = m|m7||maj7|dim|aug|!|4|5|6|7|9
This looks reasonable, but it allows no way to write a bare octave (the
commonest kind of
3) allow chord 'dialects'...
Option 1 obviously means chaos. Option 3 means chaos too.
As an implementer I just don't see myself supporting multiple different
and incompatible dialects. Writing the code would be OK - just have a
pile of tables. Supporting it and answering the questions
[someday we may standardize the syntax for defining chords and assigning
synonyms, but that can wait]
No it can't wait. The current proposals are tending towards minuscule
tinkering with the existing spec, adding no new functionality. Frank's
tirade about ABC being mired in the idioms of
I was one of the people who was asked to join the committee, but I
declined, suggesting they should concentrate on the major abc developers
instead, and that's more or less how it happened.
With hindsight I might agree it wasn't the perfect solution. Among other
things it left Jack Campin
See if I've got this right:
K: RootMode Key signature
Dlyd D lydian F# - C# - G#
DD majorF# - C#
D^e_fD sillyE# - Fb
D^f^c=g D none F# - C# - G natural
_b +-unspecified-+ Bb
This last one seems potentially
From John Chambers' site:
X:2
T:John D. Burgess
C:Geo.Cockburn
R:jig, pipe march
Z:1997 by John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
N:"Edcath"
M:6/8
L:1/8
K:D
A |"D"f3 "A7"gfe|"D" d3 "(A)"A3 |"D" d2e "F#m"f2a|"Em" agf "A7"e2A |\
"D"f3 "A7"gfe|"D" d3 "A7" c2B|"D" Adf "G" aAg|"A7" fAe "D" d2 :|
For something like this it would be handy if we could write the
ostinato part just once (there is only one bar of it, not 18).
Any ideas for a sane extension of the P: syntax that would do it?
(Eliminate the "program" bits if you don't have BarFly).
X:1
T:Lamma bada
O:mediaeval Andalus
Z:Jack
Currently, the C: flag indicates the composer field. ABC shows its
instrumental roots in the lack of any way to specify that the words to a
song were written by someone other than the composer of the tune. Now that
ABC supports lyrics, this is a situation that's increasingly common for
if you have an HP Laserjet 6P, the printer driver can create
pdf files directly. [...] I haven't looked to see, but you
should be able to download the driver from Hewlitt Packard's site.
I just tried and it looks like there aren't any Mac or Unix drivers on
their site - Windows and OS/2 only.
Some tunes are not [sic]
sopyright protected, so I've left them out. Also contributors have
occasionaly asked me not to include certain tunes,
I would like to hear the reasons why people do not want to have tunes
posted.
The point of copyrighting a tune is that you can can only reproduce
The following didn't turn up any ABC at all. Anyone know about
any of them, maybe a better URL to find the tunes?
http://famdeboer.www.cistron.nl/bagpipe.html
That one contains a ZIP file of bagpipe music auto-converted from
Bagpipe Music Writer format. The notes are mostly there, but none
There have been various interpretations on what the Pythagorian scale is
Can anyone tell me where to find out what Pythagoras said in a reliable
translation?
No text by Pythagoras survives. His ideas on music were documented much
later by Archytas and Aristoxenus.
As the New Grove entry
Apropos of Pythagorean and related tunings, I saved this article from
rec.music.early a while ago. Margo is r.m.e's resident exotic-early-
tunings wonk (she plays this way herself on a pitch-configurable
electronic keyboard). I *dare* any of you to ask her to expand on this...
From "M.
control.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts
the title track of Pentangle's Cruel
Sister is the same (rather grotesque) story as Harpen, one of the best
known Norwegian medieval ballads.
Obviously, neither Pentangle's version nor the official Norwegian are
originals - Pentangle's is clearly late 16th Century, while the ones you
find
(I have been tempted to translate abc[m]2ps to perl, just for the
yuks, and for extra portability. Then it wouldn't have to be
compiled. But I bet I'd get flamed because perl doesn't come
pre-installed on all possible computer systems. ;-)
Wouldn't the most portable
At the other end of the staff, I've received several messages from
people complaining about some of my files that put a bar line at the
start of the staff. They insist that this is illegal. It isn't, of
course, and is in fact common practice in some musical circles
(mostly
most of the tune finder's users seem to want it to return staff
notation (usually in GIF - yuck!)
A lot of people can't print PostScript, JPEG looks foul for music,
and PDF is a bloated waste of space, so what else is there?
Presumably GIF music would look better if it were generated directly
I've accidentally written some band arrangements to a couple of
English, Irish and Scottish tunes. And since I'm not exactly an expert
on this subject, I wondered if someone who knows better than me could
have a look at:
http://www.musicaviva.com/folkband/
and tell me what they thought.
The Apple writer did admit that there was still a roughly 2-second
delay in switching between keyboard and mouse. If the users of
this sort of UI would just make the necessary hardware upgrades
to take advantage of the design, this delay could be eliminated
entirely, and users could make
Two peculiarities of John Chambers' Tune Finder:
If an index is zero, the entire file is returned; if nonzero, only that
tune is returned.
Does this mean that if I convert my tune files to have only zero indices
for all the tunes, I can ensure that they are only downloaded or converted
in
, whatever
it might be.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data recipes, freeware
A couple of my musician friends don't have computers of their own,
they use Hotmail or Yahoo accounts at work or at internet cafes.
Installing an ABC application at either isn't on. Hotmail doesn't
even know how to display an attached GIF.
How can somebody on one of these systems use an emailed
I'm getting quite tempted by the idea of putting all the ABC on my
site into archive files so as to counter search engine abuse.
If you have access to the root level directory on your site you can put
up a Robots.txt file to tell webspiders not to index part or all of your
site. If you
If I understand BarFly macros correctly, they're simply bits of text that
get replaced by other bits of text. If we're suitably desperate, writing
a simple preprocessor to do that shouldn't take more than a Perl
interpreter and a rainy afternoon, and it will basically macro-enable
all
I'm confused now. Suppose I had definitions for `Mn' and `Mn2'. What
would happen (a) for `Mc' (b) for `Mc2' (c) for `Mc4' in the body of
a tune? The interesting point is whether the `n' includes a length or
not.
(a) and (b) will expand, (c) will not, since there is no macro definition
for
I also checked with amazon.com and bn.com (Barnes Noble); both told
me that the book is out of print. This might just mean that their
databases don't know where to get it. The 1965 publication was by
Cooper Square Publishers in New York, and they have a web site
I have been looking round other people's transcriptions on the net
over the last few days and I'm getting reminded of a few missing
features of ABC that would make web-trawls for music more productive.
- universal identifiers, along the lines of the Message-IDs used with
email and Usenet
T:La mourisque
T:(Basse dansse 5)
C:Tielman Susato
S:Tileman Susato: Danserye (1551)
Z:Transcribed by Frank Nordberg - http://www.musicaviva.com
%This is a temporary version - please don't redistribute yet
N:adapted by Jack Campin to regularize the layout for vertical reading, use more
N:reasonable
So it may be a good thing if we could find a webspace (a message
board) where we could write publicly who is transcribing what
(like for the O'neill tunes).
What I'm doing: all the GS McLennan tunes that I think it's legal to
put on the web, in full gracenoted detail and with a complete
Is it possible in abcm2ps, whish I'm running, to notate ghostnotes,
either with the note in ( and ), with a cross for note head or
as a smaller note?
Gracenotes {} won't do, since that makes a slur to the following note.
That slur is a design bug in abc2ps. No other program makes the same
I wonder if there any known cases of musicians encoding messages in
the fine details of how they play? This is done with song lyrics all
the time, of course, mostly by using metaphor. But I don't think I've
read of it being done with the music itself.
There are some stories of this in
I look for the Gloggauer Liederbuch, does anyone know if there
is an internet source for this renaissance song book ?
*boggle*
Do you realize how BIG it is???
It's no more complex than the Atalanta Fugiens pieces I just did, but
it would be months of work to code it all.
A hard copy cost as
their identity authenticated. If your
opinions are worth hearing (and yours obviously are) nothing else
matters.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870
I have now trashed six of these things. I haven't looked at a single
one of them. Has anybody here?
Apparently lots of people read them, since I have had plenty of good
discussion here.
I was talking about the attachments (that was what I quoted) not your
messages. If there has been any
I am trying to figure out how to make MacLynx fire up BarFly for ABC
files. The lynx.cfg file says how to set the image viewer, but not
other kinds of helper applications. Ideas?
=== http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ ===
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your
I'm probably going to have to provide an abcfix program that
attempts to standardize non-compliant abc files.
I'd like to see how that handles BarFly output.
BarFly doesn't *have* output; it's a text editor, it doesn't enforce
any ABC dialect any more than Emacs does. I've used it to write
BarFly doesn't *have* output; it's a text editor, it doesn't enforce
any ABC dialect any more than Emacs does.
Don't text editors have output?
I am not a Mac user so I have no direct experience of the nature o
BarFly, but I do know that a number of people have posted tunes in
abc
I've been doing a lot of stuff lately where it make sense to indicate
where text lines in a song finish, without doing full-on underlay of
the sort allowed for by the w: construct.
The way I've been doing it is the way old hymnbooks did it, using
double bars. But this seems rather heavyweight
The user makes more difference than the developer here. If an ABC
file is clearly written *as source*, with the right choice of default
note length and laid out with some regard to the musical structure,
it's easy to work round dialect differences because you can see what
you're editing.
And, oh yes, let's start discussing something really simple. We all
need some discussing practice before we try to handle the big stuff.
Okay: tempi in words.
It ought to be possible to write
Q:allegro
in a tune header or
[Q:allegro]
in a tune body, and optionally define outside
Another reason why BarFly's syntax for multiple voices can be useful.
This may not be as readable as honest-to-god real tablature but it's
still quite a bit easier than the original manuscript (which used
letters for the frets rather than note names and a separate rhythm
line). It was for the
I defintely don't want to have to write a Highland
pipe jig (typical grace = 1/32) like:
L:1/8
K:HP
{g//}A{d//}A{e//}A {g//e//f//}e2 f | {g//}ec{G//}c {g//e//f//}e2
How about
L:1/8 grace=1/32
K:HP
{g}A{d}A{e}A {gef}e2 f | {g}ec{G}c {gef}e2
Why the quotes?
I'd prefer
L:1/8
Is there any mileage in something like
Q:Allegro=120 % definition
...
Q:3/8=Allegro % use, meaning that the beat is 3/8 in this case
I hadn't thought about the problem of varying beat length in my initial
proposal and I should have.
What I would prefer would be to allow:
Q:[6/8]
I belive it is not really neccessary to define the beat of allegro in
Balkan music (like 3+3+2), I've never heard of such a definition in any
other music notation context. And for sure it would be an abuse of the
classical music's tempo word Allegro.
I just fished out my copy of Maud
In an attempt to wrap up this thread, would the following proposal
for a new field meet everyone's requirements ?
Field Name: q:playing style
Header: Yes
Tune Body: No
Description: Contains a written non-numerical description of the
tune's tempo or mood.
Examples:
q:Allegro
q:Lento
That
Unless your q: field provides me with a way of DEFINING those strings
in a musically intuitive way so that a numerical playback speed can be
statically deduced from the musical text (e.g. by a playback program),
there is no point in what you're suggesting. There are already about
10
I am about to release a CD-ROM with a large number of very carefully
edited and documented tunes linked off a hypertext commentary (see
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/embro/). This is the work which all the
ABC on my website is spinoffs from. I would like to include a choice
of ABC applications
: Most of
: the information fields are for use within a tune header but in
: addition some may be used in the tune body, or elsewhere in the
: tune file.
This is not a widely implemented feature of the abc standard and I
would personally like it to become deprecated. My reasoning is that
Chord notation is not free text. It is a chord. There may be no
restriction to the syntax of a chord to be presented, but semantically,
it's a chord.
And for some playback programs (Muse is one, I think) chord semantics is
both precisely defined and used by the interpreter; Laurie
hell freezes over, though...
But basically I like this set of proposals and could live with it.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975
Jack said ...Your suggestions have exactly the expressive power I was
asking for, with one minor omission: the label dotted minim = minim
you get in staff notation when the metre changes
Q:1/2 -- sets the beat to minim
abc abc
Q:3/2 -- sets the beat to dotted minim which therefore
Hear, Hear! File-global header symbols are a minor convenience in that
they save some typing if you have a large collection of say, 6/8 Jigs.
They also make certain things possible to express that cannot be done
reasonably any other way.
I have beside me a book of Galician folksongs, Daniel
BarFly's macro mechanism provides part of what I need. I can define
two separate macro files, each defining a q macro, one containing
the line:
m: q con moto = [Q:1/4=120]
and the other:
m: q con moto = ^Con Moto
and then use the definition in a tune file like this:
X:1
T:test
I haven't been able to connect to John Chambers' Tune Finder for
a few days now. Demon said they were doing some maintenance on
their US links but this seems too long an outage to be entirely
their problem.
Two things I'm looking for which ought to be out there: (1) a tune
called The Old Polka,
Two things I'm looking for which ought to be out there: (1) a tune
called The Old Polka, quite often played in Scotland, and (2) the
simple Renaissance dance tune (frottola?) Schiarazula Marazula,
in four parts, which I thought I had on paper but can't locate now
I need it.
According to my
I've put the music from Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens (1617-18) on
my website; it's more or less a song cycle on making the Philosopher's
Stone, for three voices, based on a plainsong cantus firmus.
In the reading of related material I've been doing lately, I came across
what I believe to be
There's another situation (already out there on the web) where getting
a bunch of related tunes together matters but where they don't all come
from the same book: when you want a set of tunes for a specific country
dance. If you type Hamilton House into a search engine you might want
the
Whew! a lot of syntax...
One extra thing you get in actual scores: multiple names for the same
tempo, which in your notation might be
Q:allegro=Tempo I
so that Tempo I is defined by a double indirection, in your BNF
QLine ::= Q: string = string
This might also be useful in translating
After several online discussions, I (and probably a few others) have
implemented the rather trivial extension of allowing any string of
digits, commas, hyphens and periods to label an ending. This means
that endings like [1,3 and [1-3 work with a very few abc tools.
It seems that
| After several online discussions, I (and probably a few others) have
| implemented the rather trivial extension of allowing any string of
| digits, commas, hyphens and periods to label an ending. This means
| that endings like [1,3 and [1-3 work with a very few abc tools.
|| What the accidentals =3D, ^, _ mean? Are they absolute (e g _e means
|| e flat) or are they in relation to the key (e g =3De means e flat
|| in Bb major)?
| They're absolute, just as in conventional music notation.
Just out of curiosity, are there any musical traditions/styles that
use a
Something I've also implemented is the conventional |:: ... ::|
notation that says three times through.
Every now and then I see repeat signs with 4 dots in a line instead of
2, which are simply a different style of ordinary repeat. Do you have
a reference to back up your assertion that |::
there is no reason to reject ::| and :::| notation as far as I see.
You go on to suggest a more powerful formalism, so one reason would be
that we simply don't need it.
[Simon's message rearranged...]
Additive complementary constructs (intriguing to me) could be:
:numeral|
This looks
The obvious problem for a player is that people can easily type all
sorts of of malformed endings. For example:
|: ... |1,3 ... :|4 ... :|
There's no 2nd ending here. I'd probably say that there are at least
two possible behaviors here: You could play it three times, skipping
the
I think it is reasonable to require |: at the start of a repeat section
Not given the amount of ABC out there that doesn't have one.
Like all of mine.
And I am NOT interested in re-editing the whole damn lot to please
simpleminded fussbudget implementations.
: If we can have multiple
A somewhat trickier problem is that there's currently a fair amount
of abc tunes that don't even use the initial repeat on second and
later sections. Some users seems to think that :| is a fine way to
start a repeated section.
This is also what many printed sources do, e.g.
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.
Okay, I guess both I and the 1.6 standard are wrong on that.
For instance, I want to be able to do this
are nested repeats common in serious music? Serious not meaning
classical, just that someone is seriously expected to read it
The obvious example is strophic songs. The way these are often
transcribed, they are a good case for an extended-repeat notation,
because folklorists like to write
My theory is that once upon a time, the repeat sign consisted of two
dots (:), and always coincided with a bar line.
An interesting theory, but I don't buy it because your symbol is
symmetrical and so you can't tell the difference between a start
repeat and a end repeat. Suppose your music
Some time ago, the syntax Zn was suggested for n bars of rest.
I know that abcm2ps now implements this, and I'd like to know:
1. What other programs implement this ?
2. Are there programs where this usage would create a conflict ?
(I'm thinking of the reserved characters H-Z here).
One
Here is another question. A friend asked me last night whether I knew
of a site where she could search for tunes by author - rather than by
title. I don't - have only searched by title myself. Does anyone out
there know of one?
You're in luck if the composer you're after is Ed Reavy, G.S.
Please do not send attachments to the lists. It slams the mailserver.
Slows down delivery of mail to all users and lists served by the
machine. I don't want to have to set up a filter to bounce all mail
with attachements. Thanks!
and that goes *particularly* for Taral's PGP bumf. MIDI or PS
There's another way to represent the multiple-bar rests you want that
has more general application: a length modifier that would allow you
to extend any note or chord over multiple bars. Say
[c/e/g/]5
for 5 bars of c triads half the default notelength long, with being
the do this
I've been watching how the speed of the discussion on this list has
picked up since I put the new fast mailserver in place.
I dunno about the speed (given how slow my machines are I could hardly
tell) but having a real honest-to-god From line at last is a *huge*
relief.
I am currently
| You can try to get ABC convenient, readable, close to some staff
| notation or what ever you wan't. But first of all you must keep (or
| get) it to contain unique (well formed or well defined if you want)
| information.
Well, now; I'm not sure I'd agree with that. Granted, I'd like to see
such
I just got an e mail from a Musica Viva visitor asking for Croatian
traditional music for flute. Is anybody here able to help?
Does this person have a specific piece in mind?
I don't think so. As I understand it, he's an American of Croatian
origin who wanted to learn something about his
I'm in a software engineering course this semester, and we've decided we'd
like to go at adding another product to realm of available 'abc' tools.
[...]
Right now, the idea is based mostly on writing new file format which will
implement the current standard of ABC. We want to write our
Anybody know anything about this tune? (I already asked this on
uk.music.folk, no answer). I got it as a graphics file off the
Internet years ago and have been playing it ever since, but have
come across it recently in two different contexts - a Canadian
fiddler I know plays it, and the first
crossed over into English or Scots folksong -
generally if a Gaelic tune gets used for a Scots song, the Scots text
has no relation at all to the Gaelic.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22
This one is the signature tune of the Edinburgh Shetland Fiddlers
They think it's Norwegian but nobody can remember where they got
it from Ideas?
X:1
T:The Hoy Song
Z:Jack Campin 2002
S:Edinburgh Shetland Fiddlers
M:2/4
L:1/16
Q:1/4=128
K:A % or do we play it in G? I can't remember
e2ee
This tune is really great !! It's one of my favorite in the celtic
area We play it with my folk band
You can find a cover of it by the famous breton band Tri Yann
They called it Kerfank 1870
As usual there's a web page about it once you know what to look for:
Anyone have the skinny on available fonts and licensing issues involved in
distributing those fonts? If there's a plethora, do you have a favorite,
and why is it your favorite
I guess more importantly, since I assume most of the fonts are a 'lookup
assignment table' type system, if possible,
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