Steven Bennett wrote: | I believe I decided that T: was a valid title field as well -- some pieces | simply don't have a title.
Yes; I have a number of examples where I don't want a title. Mostly they're musical fragments, or things like a blank manuscript page. OTOH, one thing my Tune Finder has run across is ABC files that lack a title because they are incorporated in some fashion inside HTML files, and the title is in the HTML. This is frustrating, because it's nearly impossible for software to discover the title. These are mostly songs, it turns out, and they aren't in my index. One example is the collection at natura.di.uminho.pt, where the latest run of my search bot says all the titles just disappeared. I'd known this was a problem with that site, which has hundreds of trad Portuguese songs in ABC. My index showed 72 tunes in 43 files, but only 32 had titles. This time, the file and tune counts dropped by one, but the title count dropped to zero. I checked, and the tunes are still there, but the T lines are all just "T:". If you look at the site, you'll see the tunes as GIF images and ABC, but the title is in a different font because it's in the HTML only. I've considered writing special code to deal with several sites like this, but it wouldn't be easy. I don't care if my blank manuscript pages aren't indexed, because there's no music there. Of course, if someone is specifically looking for ABC files that give blank manuscript pages, they won't find it from my Tune Finder. But so far I don't consider that a problem. | Maybe we should add a few comments in the ABC 2.0 spec that discusses what | the behavior of a blank field line should be. That way we don't get a | zillion different behaviors. Yes, this is useful. I do a fair amount of programming in perl, which is often very sketchy because most of the language has defaults and can be omitted for the most common case. This works pretty well for perl. Part of the reason is that the defaults have been fairly thoroughly discussed in the comp.lang.perl newsgroup, and the user population generally agrees on what the default should be. Whether we could get this sort of agreement from musicians isn't as clear. In conventional staff notation, a lot of things are often omitted, but what is omitted differs for different musical styles. I can think of a number of examples where the best default for omitted notation is different in different styles. | > This does remind me that I've got a few funny questions about why I | > sometimes do things like putting "K:G" at the start of a tune and | > then "K:Em" or "K:Ador" before a later phrase. | > to be very convincing. | | Until recently, I would have found such fields confusing as well. But | having recently absorbed a lot of chord theory, it becomes almost necessary | to have such fields where the key actually does change, because the chord | progressions for "K:G" and "K:Em" are different, even though the key | notation looks the same on the staff. | | That's also why I now prefer to display the key as a text string above the | staff in addition to the on-the-staff notation. Yeah, and you see that sometimes in classical music, though usually they let you figure out the key change yourself. It's especially useful in computerized notation, because it lets the computer help you by doing searches for keys, suggesting chords as a few abc apps do, and so on. Of course, its usefulness is limited, as you don't want to bother notating key changes that are only for a few measures. An interesting case where I don't indicate key changes much is in my klezmer collection. You might think that it would be useful, in light of all the different scales and frequent key changes. But frequent key changes is the reason it's not useful. Klezmer music often changes rapidly among a number of closely-related keys, and once you're familiar with this, the changes are pretty obvious. But a key change every 2 or 3 measures rapidly gets obnoxious. So I just pick most common (or initial or final) key, and use that. Irish/Scottish music is different. Some tunes do have transient changes to another key. But more common is to have the different sections of a tune in different keys. I prefer to notate this, even if it's the same signature. That way, if I'm looking for an Em tune, I also get the tunes in G/Em (or maybe D/Edor). Sometimes I decide that one of those tunes will work in the set I'm putting together. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
