Frank Nordberg writes: | | Here's a simple thought experiment: ...
I loved that one! And I've seen any number of examples like it on several mailing lists. This isn't surprising, because as Jack so elegantly pointed out, there are a LOT of people who type and read abc directly, with no help from and abc software. They use it as a means of human-to-human musical communication. If they can understand it, that's good enough. I've seen a couple of cases where the writer got it almost right, but put the note lengths before the note. This is every bit as logical as putting it after the note, and Chris could have done it that way. But it produces some "interesting" variants on the tunes when you feed it to abc software. I've also seen abc written with / or ! for bar lines, single-quote chars for chords, brackets for slurs, and other such variants. All of these obviously made sense to the person who typed them, and I could read them, after a brief pause to figure out the encoding. But I wouldn't call any of these "ABC". A while back, I looked into the possibility of writing a program that would translate solfa into abc. This sounds like a good idea, because there's a fair amount of vocal music on the Web in solfa form. But I gave up after a bit of research. Every site seemed to have a different notation that they called "solfa", and there was no obvious common syntax. It's a lot like Frank's thought experiment, but it's for real. So solfa is a purely human-readable notation, and it's pretty hopeless from a programmer's viewpoint. It's somewhat of a shame, because there's a population of solfa users out there, and they could benefit from abc-like software. But unless they can be persuaded to move to a common standard, there won't be much software written for them. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
