>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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