On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 03:31:50PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: > Richard Robinson writes: > | On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 09:38:29AM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: > | > > | One possible counter-argument would be, that if ABC was able to express > | things that no other software can, just imagine the explosion of > | usefulness. Tunes might start turning up containing information that > | people previously didn't have any way of expressing. > | > | "Some people believe this has already happened", to borrow from Douglas > | Adams. > > Indeed. I've tried a lot of commercial music packages, and what I > like to do is to attempt to type in a song like "Jovano, Jovanke". > Now, most people in the international dance crowd will know this > song, and probably most randomly-chosed Serbian 8-year-olds could > sing it to you. But it wants a meter of 7/8 and a key signature that > (in D) has two flats and one sharp. Both completely normal, simple, > everyday rhythm and scale in that part of the world.
I've found myself remembering that Bartok piano tutor. In about 6 volumes, starts out with stuff that someone pretty close to a beginner could play, and gets progressively more complicated. ... given that the beginner really _is_ a beginner, doesn't have too many fixed ideas. Things like, different key signatures in the 2 hands. Possibly different timesigs, as well, I can't remember. Some of those could make interesting test pieces, too. Mikrokosmos, is that what it was called ? > When I first ran across abc, I was quite impressed by the fact that > it (abc2ps actually) accepted M:7/8 without complaint and did the > Right Thing. When I tried M:4+3+4/16, it also did exactly what I > wanted it to do. Yes, that was a thing that impressed me, too. > > It didn't surprise me in the least when abc web sites started showing > up. It doesn't surprise me now to see that abc is the only common > music notation on the Net. > > (I do think abc could use some competition, though. When are we going > to see some big Lilypond or MusicML web sites?) I think possibly they'd be "big" in different senses ? ISTM that ABC's strength is, lots and lots of little tunes, and it gets weaker as the individual pieces get bigger - start spreading over several pages, make bigger notational demands, need more precise control of layout, "Beautiful Typesetting" ... which seems to be where lilypond takes over. So I'd expect "big" lilypond sites to be, umm, more like Laura's than like mine. Has anybody seen any of the XMLish schemes do anything useful, yet ? I haven't had a look round recently, ibut whenever I have it's all looks kind of "maybe one day"-ish. -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
