Staff notation differes from tablature notation in many ways, but a fundamental point of difference is that ordinary staff notation specifys only the pitch of each note, and not where on the instrument it is produced, for instruments with alternatives this leaves it up to the player, and must be determined in advance, which is a difficulty when playing by sight.
Annotations on the score will tell a guitarist what position to play in, an organist might have separate staves for each manual; a number of conventions address this issue, but for a computer program it comes down to what data is recorded internally. MusicXML records the fret and the pitch; but not the tuning (its a big specification, might have missed that). Notation software can review the recorded note/fret pairs and deduce the open tuning (and therefore the implied course) so long as two things are true - fretting must be indicated as if it was chromatic, no two courses can have the same open pitch. I suspect there are some historical cittern tabulatures which break the first; and the second may be a problem for some scordaturas on appalachian dulcimer (which also has a diatonic fretting issue). The 5-string banjo has a myriad of tunings that i have not explored, perhaps its fifth string is sometimes tuned-down to double the first? Q - Besides the strummed dulcimer, ignoring octaves and sympathetic drones, can anyone think of an instrument which (sometimes) employs duplicated-pitch open courses? -- Dana Emery To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
