| > Nigel Gatherer, Crieff, Scotland writes: | > | My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose | > | (also called "Low Down In the Broom") | > | | > | s .m |d :- .d|r :m |d' :- .t|l :s |l :- .s |l :d' |r' :- | | > | d'.r',m'|d :- .d|r :m |d' :- .t|l :s |l :- .s |l :t |d' :- | | > | :s |d' :m' |r':d'|l .d':- |s :m |s :- .s |f':- .m'|r' :- | | > | - :s' |m' :s' |m':d'|l :d' |s :m |s :- .s |l :t |d' :- || | | Yes, I thought of this notation one night as I sipped a gin and tonic, | so I thought I'd call it Tonic sol-fa (lies, lies). | | I have no recollection of learning sol-fa at school, but it's obvious | that I did, because it is ingrained; I can "hear" a piece of sol-fa, I | can sing sol-fa correctly, and with a very small effort can write it | fairly well. And I'm sure that many other people can as well, which | brings me to suspect that it may be more valuable than ABC. Very few | people learn to read ABC because it translates so easy to sound or | standard notation. Sol-fa has no such translators, making it necessary | to sing it, thus shortening the internalization of the melody, and | strengthening its relationship to the physical body. I also think that | more people would understand it than would understand (or even have | heard of) ABC - in this case I reasoned that it was more likely that a | Greek woman would be able to "hear" the sol-fa than the ABC. | | Don't get me wrong - I love ABC, and use it a lot, but I'm beginning to | think that sol-fa is more valuable from a learning point of view. What | do you think?
Well, I didn't really learn this when I was little, but it does seem straightforward. I wonder if we could actually do something useful and computerish with it. The meaning of the letters is quite obvious. The rhythic symbols are a bit puzzling. What do all those punctuation characters really mean? I likely know a slightly different version of the tune, so the rhythms that I hear don't map in any obvious way to the funny characters. My first guess is that the colon is a beat separator, '-' is a tie, and dot and comma mean "short". But I could be misinterpreting them. An obvious way to make this useful would be to write translators to and from abc. And we might want to keep it even simpler than abc, thus losing some of abc's gimmicks. It also looks like a notation intended for singing, so we'd want a simple notation for the lyrics. Didn't someone recently do (or at least think publicly about) a tool to translate between abc and the French scale notation? This looks like a very similar notation, except using the English scale names (which by some coincidence all start with different letters). Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
