P J Headford comments: | Just a reminder ... | ABC is not just a computer thing. | I know quite a few musicians who can play you the tune from the ABC | notation.
This is worth repeating periodically as a reminder of one of ABC's main features. One example from last year: I got email from someone saying that their daughter wanted to learn a tune for a musical contest, and it was available online, but they were having problems getting software to convert it to readable music. I recommended that she learn to read the ABC directly, and sent a brief description of how ABC works. A day or so later, I got another message saying that she had learned the tune from the ABC and was busy practicing. One of the benefits of any plain-text data format is that you don't necessarily need any fancy tools to read it. Plain text does work against the fancy formatting, fonts, etc. that you can get with more complex tools. But if you just want the information, plain text can be a lot better than the fancier formats. Of course, there's a lot of ABC that's poorly formatted and difficult to read, justasreadingruntogetherEnglishtextwouldbe. But that's not a problem with ABC itself. | Also, when I'm in a session and someone plays a tune I'd like to remember, | I can simply note down the first few bars in ABC more quickly (and more | legibly) in ABC than stave notation. If you look up Chris Walshaw's story on how he invented ABC, you'll see that this was exactly where he started. He was familiar with TeX and MusicTeX, and it occurred to him that a simple translator could turn his alphabetic notation into music notation. The result was abc2mtex. But the original form of ABC was handwritten music. | >From what is being said on the list, I gather MusicXML would not have this | interface to the real world. MusicXML is intended as a computer-friendly music notation. It's not at all a replacement or competitor for ABC. The advent of powerful "word processor" software hasn't eliminated the usefulness of plain-text documents, and it's likely that ABC will continue to be used despite all the powerful music software that's being developed. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
