Toni writes: | ... | > How an ABC tune is translated to staff notation, or Tabulatur, or MIDI, or whatever | > however, will always be subject to difficulties, as there are | > so many variants of staff notation. | | Yes! That's it! | 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 a computerized notation, and I suspect that both the lilypond and MusicML people are making good progress toward such a goal. But I don't think that we should push ABC in this direction. ABC's niche that led to its success is that it's a relatively simple, basic, plain-text notation that is compact and mailable. It doesn't require a sophisticated UI; it can be typed (and read) by mere humans. None of this would be true of any notation that is well formed and well defined. Furthermore, such precision isn't necessary. The proof of this is staff notation. It has survived for centuries, and has been adapted to many different musical styles, despite its serious deficiencies and ambiguities. You could argue that its success is partly because of these "problems". Thus, people have spent a lot of time agonizing over the limitations of the 7-note octave and the 12-note chromatic scale. But staff notation is routinely used in many musical styles that have all sorts of other scales. Thus, in the Middle East, it's common to simply state the scale at the top. None of the scales actually use more than 7 notes in an octave, except in the same sense as the classical minor scale that has an ascending and a descending form. So 7 notes and 3 accidentals are sufficient for the knowledgeable practitioners who know how to adjust the intonation for the stated scale. Precise marks to describe the intonation are not necessary, and just clutter up the page and make it less readable. Similarly, the persistence of accidentals has different rules in some different kinds of music. This is a problem for people looking at music in an unfamiliar style. But it's not a problem for the "insiders" who know the style. They know their rules, and don't need to mess up the page with unnecessary junk. The result is often incompatible rules in different styles. One case that I've seen a lot: I play traditional Scandinavian music, in which it's common to divide the beat more or less at random into 2, 3, 4 and 5 notes. Very often, the usual tuplet notation is omitted, because it just clutters up the music. To do it accurately, you'd need a tuplet thingie on half the beats, and this is just messy. So it's often omitted. OTOH, in Balkan music (which I also play), this doesn't work at all. The music inherently uses beats of different lengths. It's common to have a 3-note beat followed by a 2-note beat, and the first is 50% longer than the second. If that first 3-note beat should be in the same time as the second 2-note beat, you need to indicate the triplet. So you see tuplet notation in this style. Thus, when a Swedish musician sees something like | CDE FG AB |, the normal interpretation would be that the CDE is a triplet. When a Bulgarian musician sees this, the normal interpretation is that this is a 7-count measure whose first beat is 50% longer than the other two. Both of these involve sloppy, imprecise notation, and both are done to keep the notation simple. Neither is at all confusing to a musician who knows the style. Anyhow, I think ABC should be kept simple. And any problem that it shares with staff notation is a pseudo-problem that can be easily ignored by most of its users. High precision should be left to the more sophisticated notations that others are developing. (And we should be encouraging them to include ABC as an input/output format, despite its loss of information.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
