Jack Campin writes: | That's similar to what Curwen sol-fa does, ... Damn! You beat me to it. I had the same reaction.
| (I'm sure somebody somewhere has invented an ASCII representation for | solfa ... When solfa first came up on this list, I did a bit of investigation, and found a number of sites that do solfa in ASCII. Unfortunately, no two of them do it the same way. I couldn't find any references to software that dealt explicitly with solfa; it's just printed as text. This is quite similar to Chris Walshaw's story of how he started ABC as a handwritten notation. Many people have mentioned using their own improvised notation that is very similar. ABC has become widely used because Chris started storing his handwritten notes in his computer, and then decided to try his hand at a program (abc2mtex) that converted it to staff notation. Then he made the mistake of showing it to a few friends. (And now he's the leader of a cult ... ;-) This doesn't seem to have happened yet with solfa. It works ok as just a plain-text notation. Its various user groups don't interact much, and there's no software that parses it, so the variants in the notation aren't a serious problem. But suppose someone were to do something like Chris did. Pick a solfa variant and write some useful software for it. There's a good chance that it would spread among singers like ABC has among instrumentalists. Anyone want to take on the mantle of leader in this? To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
