[Menvi-discuss] text-based music systems

[Rick Coates]

Hello Marc:

I created a letter notation system around the year 2000 for my large print
students who could not access standard staff notation.  After creating it I
found similarities to the ABC method.  My quarter notes would be upper case
letters of the pitch, such C.  Note values greater than quarter note were
created with number values, half note 2C or whole note 4C.  Eighth notes
were lower case letters with dashes indicating the subdivision of the
beat.  In many ways, I tried to apply common sense solutions to this
method.  The method is called V.I. (visual impairment) Music Notation
Method.  This year I have a student who reads a font size of 66 and she is
excited about learning how to read music using this method.

Rick Coates


On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Marc Sabatella <marc at outsideshore.com>wrote:

>  I'd like to pick up on a number of threads from these discussions, as
> well as parallel discussions I've been having on the music21 mailing list
> (music21 being the programming environment I mentioned having used to
> develop some tool prototypes recently) and a couple of other offline
> discussions.
>
> The idea of using text-based notation systems has a lot of merit, I think,
> and I glad to see others expressing interest in it.  In separate post, I'll
> talk about tool support, but here I'd like to focus on the notation systems
> themselves.
>
> I have described some of the reasons I settled on ABC for my work with
> Samantha.  I like the relatively simple syntax and the large variety of
> tools that can work with it.
>
> I mentioned octave specification as something that I don't particularly
> love about ABC.  As with many other systems, each octave in ABC goes from C
> to B.  Some systems use numbers - eg, middle C is C4, C5 is an octave above
> (other systems assign those same numbers differently).  ABC does it by
> making middle C be C (capital), the C above that being c (lower case).
> Octaves above the c-b octave get one or more apostrophes (c' c'' etc),
> octaves below the C-B octave get one or more commas (C, C,, etc.).  There
> are ways of resetting things so that C becomes an octave or two below
> middle so you can write bass clef parts without tons of commas.  I don't
> love the apostrophes and commas, but it is what it is.
>
> The real problem is that since octaves are always C-based, it's easy to
> forget to change octaves in the middle of a line.  For example, "Twinkle
> Twinkle Little Star" in G major in ABC is
>
> G G d d | e e d2 | c c B B | A A G2
>
> and you had better remember to start making those letters lower case
> starting at c.  Standard notation doesn't have that issue.  I found myself
> making octave errors in ABC all the time, although looking at the standard
> notation that was displayed in another window made these easy to catch.
> Sam found it harder to find and correct her own errors.
>
> I guess Braille music has a more clever way of solving the octave issue,
> by making octave specification relative to context.  For that matter,
> notation programs like MuseScore and Sibelius use relative octave
> specification way too.  If you type "C" into either of these programs, you
> get the C that is closest to the last note you entered.  If I were
> designing a text-based language from scratch, I'd consider trying to use a
> relative octave specification rather than an absolute one.  And the idea of
> designing out our text-based notation language is worth considering.  But
> developing the full set of tools necessary to work with it makes this a
> more long term project.  I'd still like to concentrate on what can be done
> right now with existing tools and maybe just a little bit of extra work on
> integrating them.
>
> Someone offline asked about how ABC handles multiple voices.  ABC is
> actually pretty elegant here, to a point.  The main mechanism is to have
> declarations up front listing all the voices and giving them names (perhaps
> just V1, V2, etc).  Then you can switch between them by referencing their
> names.  For example, here is a simple two-voice arrangement of "Twinkle
> Twinkle Little Star" (and note the octave indications):
>
> % first declare your voices
> V:upper
> V:lower
> % then reference them by name
> [V:upper] G G d d | e e d2 | c c B B | A A G2 ||
> [V:lower] G,2 B,2 | C2 B,2 | A,2 G,2 | D,2 G,2 ||
>
> During the declaration you can give details like which way stems should
> go, etc.  The elegant thing here is that this is the **exact** same
> mechanism used to define a score with multiple staves.  As far as the music
> itself is concerned, it really doesn't matter if these two voices are
> represented on one staff or two, and that's how it is with ABC as well.  I
> gather Braille might be similar?
>
> If you wish to convert ABC to standard notation and have them display on
> one staff, you do that with another declaration that lists how you want the
> voices combined.  By default, each voice is its own staff, but the
> following declares them to share a staff, by listing the voices you want
> combined in parentheses:
>
> I:score (upper lower)
>
> This system works well if each voice is used consistently through the
> piece.  For piano music where a voice might just sort of show up for a beat
> or two here, it's overkill, but ABC provides an alternative that often
> works well: just use an ampersand at the end of a measure followed by the
> contents of the temporary voice for that measure. So the above example
> could have been written:
>
> G G d d & G,2 B,2 | e e d2 & C2 B,2 | c c B B & A,2 G,2 | A A G2 & D,2 G,2
> ||
>
> Things get uglier in more complex cases, but it's doable.  There's
> practically nothing that can't be represented in ABC.  But realistically,
> as a sighted user, I rely on the window showing me the standard notation as
> I type my ABC to let me know if I've made a mistake in my syntax.  The more
> complex the score, the more likely it is that I might type something wrong,
> rendering the whole thing garbage to a program trying to play it back or
> convert it to standard notation.  So while it's *possible* to do a whole
> orchestra score in ABC, I wouldn't recommend it.  But as a way of notating
> short exercises, even moderately complex pieces with some practice, it is
> something that can work *today*.
>
> Anyhow, my goal here isn't to convert people to my religion here - if
> others are more comfortable with Mup or something else, that's great.  And
> I'd still love to hear about what you like or don't like about any of these
> systems - or why you feel none of them could work for you.
>
> Again, in a separate post, I will talk more about some interesting tools
> that already exist or that could exist.
>
> Marc
>
>
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