Nigel wrote: > It was the precursor of ABC notation in the days long before personal > computers and the internet. Simple, could be written using a > typewriter, able to handle accidentals, upper and lower octaves, > rhythm. I believe Gavin Greig used it in his collecting folk song in > the North East of Scotland. Sam Henry did the same in Northern Ireland. > Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains still uses it, I believe.
I've googled "Tonic Sol Fa" and looked at a number of the sites that aren't about the shlocky group by that name. I'd say that it isn't ready for prime time on the Web. True, a lot of people seem to be familiar with it. But of the songs that I found (and there weren't many), there was very little consistency in the notation, and one would have to put out a huge effort to write code that could make sense of it. We have problems with inconsistent abc, but abc is a paragon of standardization in comparison with tonic sol fa. If people were interested in making it a useful Web notation, we'd want to try to foist a standard syntax on its users to make it tractable to software. This might be easy or difficult, depending on how the established user community reacts. Probably the best way to do it would be to form a small cabal to develop some useful software in stealth mode, together with a few web sites with a lot of the music that the users will want to download. If the online tunes and software are useful to the users, they'll probably jump on the bandwagon. Given that much of the existing user community consists of schools and community choral groups, the best idea might be to develop some java (or javascript) tools to download, play, and edit TSF files. This would make it useful no matter what sort of computer they're on. Provide songs from common songbooks for downloading, and it just might take off. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
