Phil Taylor writes:
|
| True. An additional problem is one which you yourself pointed out
| recently: users often write abc which is intended to be read only by
| human readers. In other words they are treating abc as a natural
| language. In this context any variation on abc syntax is OK as long
| as it's obvious what is meant. I've always been in two minds as to
| what programmers should do about this. Coping with all the possible
| variations of syntax whose meaning is "obvious" is an interesting
| programming challenge. On the other hand, to allow too many variations
| is to contribute to the deterioration of the language.
Maybe, maybe not. One could make the argument that one of the real
strengths of traditional staff notation is that groups of musicians
have never been bound by any enforcable rules. If you think you need
some special notation for your music, you just invent the notation,
put it on the paper, and share it with your musical friends. Nobody
can stop you. This does lead to a lot of varied notation, but it also
allows musicians to transcribe what they consider important in their
music. Without this ability, we'd be stuck with 12th-century music
notation and no way to represent modern music. There could never have
been a choral or orchestral tradition, because only monophonic music
would have been allowed.
One of the things that always stopped me from using any of the
various commercial music packages was that I'd test them by trying to
enter some of the tunes that I like to play, and they'd refuse to
accept my "illegal" music. This wouldn't have been so bad if I'd had
a way to fix the problem. But with proprietary software, I was just
out of luck. So I didn't bother. And I couldn't put music on the Net
except in facsimile form.
One of ABC's real strengths is the availability of the source code. I
can modify and extend it to represent the music that I play. This is
not as easy as with a sheet of paper and a pen, granted, but at least
it's possible. If some musical dummies decree that my music can't be
represented, I can just quietly thumb my nose at them, as I do with
paper and pen, and modify the code to do what I need. I don't need to
beg and plead with someone whose idea of music notation is one intro
music theory class or whatever they picked up at random in their
music lessons.
I wouldn't call this "deterioration". I'd say that ABC stands a good
chance of being a living, usable music notation system for much of
the world's music. The reason is that it's possible for users to
improve it (with or without our permission).
Of course, if we can do this as a social group, and build software
that handles a wide variety of music, we'll have something even more
valuable. It's also possible that useful musical ideas will be
quashed by the narrower members of the group, and ABC will split into
incompatible dialects. The difficulty of modifying someone else's
code will encourage this. But this is still better than the
commercial music packages, which don't permit a lot of the things
that a lot of musicians need.
ABC as it is now is just too useful. People are going to use it. If
you want to prevent "deterioration", the only practical way is to
keep people talking to each other, and try to get them to work out
common ways of dealing with all the things that different kinds of
musicians need.
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