In some other fora, there has been much discussion lately of the Great Firewall of China, which is blocking Chinese access to all sorts of things on the Net. Among them are most of the search sites, especially google.com, and all of mit.edu. The folks at MIT are somewhat bemused by this, of course. It's not like there's all that much Chinese political stuff on mit.edu machines. Not much porn, either. Maybe they're afraid that Chinese school kids will find the MIT Open Course Ware project and become engineers?
Something that has occurred to a few of us is that, with the search sites in general, and my abc tune finder in particular blocked (because it's at MIT), this means that Chinese owners of music would have a lot of trouble discovering copyright violations. So we should try to get some current Chinese music on the Net in abc form, and see if anyone over there notices. Of course, China is more known for doing the violating, but there's lots of new music coming out of China these days. 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. Looking through my index files, I don't seem to see much. >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. Ornaments have intonation all over the place, of course, as with most kinds of music, but the usual practice seems to be to use the common "Western" ornaments, and "You just have to know how to play them". As with most music. I wonder if Falun Gong has a nice anthem about the joys of exercise in the park at dawn? ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
