Robert Bley-Vroman writes:
| (There is a kind of weak analogy between this and something we were
| discussing a while back. The abc notation system should say that A means
| "the A above middle C". It need not (must not) define A as 440 Hz. This
| lack of specificity is a virtue, not a defect.)
And, of course, a number of us have loudly objected to even that
amount of specificity. I'd prefer that ABC merely says that A is
higher than C and lower than c, and say nothing at all about the
pitch. I play instruments in several octaves, and my accordion has
stops that change the octave of the keys. Terms like "middle C" just
get in the way for people like me. (Let's see, on my soprano recorder
there are three C's, so it's obvious which one is "middle C". ;-)
Staff notation has survived quite well for centuries without any
well-defined pitch standard. Musicians to say A=440 true, but if you
play that pitch, they will happily tune instruments in any octave to
it, and not be much aware that they are off by N octaves.
Anyway, one of the things I've found very useful about ABC is that
the "guitar chord" notation is exactly like fake-book notation. There
are good reasons that people use this notation even though the chords
could be written out. The value is in its simplicity. Making ABC's
chord notation more complex isn't an improvement. The only way we
really can improve it is by having a somewhat better definition of
how to write various chords. The "standard" notation is somewhat of a
mess, as others have hinted.
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