Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation

[Chuck Boody]

Please forgive me if this is a "bottom post" group.  Just tell me and 
I'll follow the rules.  I belong to lots of groups with differing 
opinions on that one!

I guess this is a good place to jump in.  I'm a reasonably good abc 
user, but bow to Phil, Ulf, John and lot of others any time.  However I 
do have a fairly large background in attempts to write music notation 
in text characters.  I wrote a PhD dissertation a long time ago 
that spent a chapter on the methods then in use.  So, I do have some 
thoughts about Mike's proposal.  I've tried to excerpt the comments 
below and add mine.  I hope they are useful.

On Tuesday, June 8, 2004, at 05:18  PM, Michael Ellis wrote:
Hi Ulf, Phil, and Stephen,
But first I'd like to emphasize that my intent is not to criticize or
replace the existing abc notation. I admire it greatly and wish I had
known of it earlier.  Rather, I wanted to offer a possible extension
that might be of value to some.
I think this is a crucial point.  To "mess with" the foundations of abc 
would be impossible now.  Anything added  has to be added not 
replacing.  I would reject Mike's whole idea were he not proposing a 
variant.

To them, it wasas thoughIwas joi ningwords a crossspaces. Very 
disconcerting.

I had a violinist who could play from Ford Columbia Music Notation 
which was much worse than either abc or Mike's proposal.  So, one can 
learn anything.  From my perspective the crucial issues are: how easy 
is it to read and how quickly can I write it?  I think Mike's proposal 
makes rhythms much clearer to the user and in some (many?) cases is 
easier to quickly write down than standard abc.  I might be inclined to 
use it as a musical shorthand if I didn't usually just transcribe to 
music.


Well, your system can't do anything that abc can't do already.
You're right. That's why I'm proposing it as an optional variant.
As I said this is the only way I would accept the idea.

All your
proposal does is to bring in a more difficult readability and 
significant
problems with parsing to midi or other code.
I think it improves human readability and I agree that machine parsing
(tokenizing, actually) would be more complex in that the tokenizer 
would
need to gather all the pitches and dashes between whitespaces before
determining the unit of subdivision for each beat.
I agree with all of this.  As a programmer for the past 25 or so years 
I can see the parsing difficulties and also as a human (the last time I 
checked) I can see the ease of reading.


I can't see there are any
advantages in it. Since all of us use abc since years and are 
perfectly
accustomed to read it
I think the benefits would be greatest for new users. I certainly would
not propose to force anyone to learn a new system!
Agreed.  Also probably quicker for quick transcriptions of pieces.  I 
actually transcribe direct to music notation though


---
On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 04:57, Stephen Kellett wrote:
Main problem: You've used an existing symbol '-' to represent 2
different things (in one place you call this "minus" and in another
"dash") and that is in addition to the already existing use of this
character in present ABC notation.

I'm not wedded to '-', another character, '*' for example, would do as
well. Perhaps it could be an argument to the variant flag, e.g. 'V:*'  
I
used '-' in my proposal because it seems the most natural character for
the job and it's the easiest to write when transcribing with pencil &
paper.



If the concept is acceptable one can work out the symbology later.  I 
don't think the issue of multiple uses of symbols is an issue for a 
program, since the V:- at the beginning would clearly indicate when one 
had to consider a second use of the dash.


On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 05:02, Phil Taylor wrote:
%Example 2
M:4/4
V:-
| ab a--b abc -efg |

M:4/4
L:1/8
K:C
| ab a>b (3abc- efg |
(that bar doesn't add up, by the way)
I think the equivalent abc notation (with L:1/8) would be
| ab a>b (3abc- c/2e/2f/2g/2 |
which does add up.
L:1/16 would be a bit cleaner
| a2b2 a2>b (3abc- cefg | % did I get that right?
but I think | ab a--b abc -efg | is crystal clear by comparison.
Me too.
On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 09:04, Jack Campin wrote:
That's similar to what Curwen sol-fa does, except that sol-fa uses
proportional spacing to provide a visual backup for its implicit
coding of note length.

I did a master's paper on Curwen.  The pitch notation is neat.  the 
rhythm notation is opaque at best, and gives no indication of beaming 
etc. (or at least very little).

(I'm sure somebody somewhere has invented an ASCII representation for
solfa - not much point in a human using it directly, as solfa uses
kerning and non-ASCII characters to useful effect, but such a thing
might make a better target for a translator).
Writing a translator from standard abc to my proposal is not too
difficult, especially in a high-level language like Python, Tcl, or
PHP.  Going the other way might not be too hard, either.
I'm not

Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation

[Jack Campin]

> I'm not familiar with Curwen sol-fa. It sounds interesting. I gather
> from your description that it relies on computer typography. I suppose
> I'm more interested at the moment in simple alphanumeric notations,
> but I'd like to look into Curwen later.

It's a 19th century system, designed for movable lead type.  I haven't
seen any computer-set examples of it.  It would be easy enough to do in
TeX.  The New Grove has a good article on it.

What would be really useful would be to replicate what some songbooks
do, putting the sol-fa for the tune above the staff so that singers
could choose which notation they wanted.  It turns out to be a real
bugger to even get an ASCII approximation to that - you need a lot of
punctuation signs in between notes, and ABC likes to align guitar
chords or words against specific notes so you have nothing to anchor
this stuff to.  I tried to do the wild Nigerian hymn example from the
New Grove "Notation" article and gave up.


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Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation

[Michael Ellis]

Hi Ulf, Phil, and Stephen,

Thanks for commenting candidly on my proposal.  I've responded to
various points you've raised at the end of the message. 

But first I'd like to emphasize that my intent is not to criticize or
replace the existing abc notation. I admire it greatly and wish I had
known of it earlier.  Rather, I wanted to offer a possible extension
that might be of value to some. As I alluded in my first post, I've been
working intermittently along similar lines for about 15 years in an
effort to solve my own problems with performing from sheet music. 

Perhaps a story will illustrate the point. About 20 years ago, I composed
some original tunes and humorous lyrics for a fund-raiser at my church. 
I used an early Macintosh music program to create a choral score with 
accompaniment. 

The music sounded rhythmically correct when played on the computer. However,
the organist and the choral director, both conservatory-trained, complained that 
the music was difficult to read and play. They said the rhythm was wrong.
I checked every measure and all the note values added up correctly. I couldn't 
figure out what they were on about and they didn't seem to be able to explain
it to me.

Fast forward a couple of years. I was taking piano lessons.  Reading and playing
in rhythm was a big problem. One night my teacher loaned me a college
introduction to music theory written in the 50's. It contained the clearest explication
of rhythm and counting I've ever seen.  In particular, it emphasized the importance
of thinking about melodies as a series of subdivided beats rather than as a 
sequence of notes of varying duration. 

The light went on for me. In a very short period of time, my ability to
perform rhythms from sheet music improved dramatically. I also finally
understood what had bothered the organist and choral director. My Mac
program had allowed me to beam notes across beats and in my ignorance,
I had done so willy-nilly. 

To them, it wasas thoughIwas joi ningwords a crossspaces. Very disconcerting.

And that, basically, is the reason I offered the proposal.  I discovered
abc about a week ago when I decided to pursue a longstanding interest in
learning Scottish fiddle. Trying to play from downloaded abc's gave me the same
feeling the organist and choral director must have had.  I had to re-copy
the abc's with spaces between the beats in order to play them comfortably. Having
done that, it then became obvious division of beats and a simple note 
continuation character sufficient to represent any rhythm, no matter how complex.

Cheers,
Mike Ellis


-
On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 02:05, Ulf Bro wrote:

> Well, your system can't do anything that abc can't do already. 

You're right. That's why I'm proposing it as an optional variant.


> All your 
> proposal does is to bring in a more difficult readability and significant 
> problems with parsing to midi or other code. 

I think it improves human readability and I agree that machine parsing
(tokenizing, actually) would be more complex in that the tokenizer would
need to gather all the pitches and dashes between whitespaces before
determining the unit of subdivision for each beat. It would also need to
remember the last pitch from the prior beat in case the next beat starts
with a dash.

> I can't see there are any 
> advantages in it. Since all of us use abc since years and are perfectly 
> accustomed to read it - whenever I write down a piece of music from MP3 or 
> minidisc I listen to a line, write it down, play it once more and compare 
> what I hear to what I have written (without converting the written to sheet 
> music), I'd say that making any such changes would force me to learn a new 
> system although the old one works perfectly well.

I think the benefits would be greatest for new users. I certainly would
not propose to force anyone to learn a new system!

---

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 04:57, Stephen Kellett wrote:

> Main problem: You've used an existing symbol '-' to represent 2 
> different things (in one place you call this "minus" and in another 
> "dash") and that is in addition to the already existing use of this 
> character in present ABC notation. Any ABC file written with your 
> notation breaks any ABC software not updated to handle the additional 
> interpretations of '-'.

I'm not wedded to '-', another character, '*' for example, would do as
well. Perhaps it could be an argument to the variant flag, e.g. 'V:*'  I
used '-' in my proposal because it seems the most natural character for
the job and it's the easiest to write when transcribing with pencil &
paper. 


As to breaking existing software, you're right and the dash is the least
of the problems! Perhaps someone more knowledgable than I about the abc
standard can comment as to whether there's any existing flag that tells
a parser "Stop! unsupported version here."


>Is "Tilde" ~ used? What about "equals" = ?
I believe '~' is a general ornament and '=' is the natural sign.

On T

[abcusers] force a linefeed in the ps output

[joe mc cool]

Please,
dealing with Irish traditional music.  When beginners come to a repeat, 
they often experience difficulty locating the |:

How can I persuade abcm2ps to output a lf at the |: ?  Or indeed anywthere ?
The -B option is not quite what I need.
Sorry to trouble ye with this.
--
Joe Mc Cool ===
Tangent Computer Research BT71 7LN (www.tangent-research.com)
voice:(44)2837-548074mob:(44)7802-572441

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Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation

[John Chambers]

Jack Campin writes:
| That's similar to what Curwen sol-fa does, ...

Damn!  You beat me to it.  I had the same reaction.

| (I'm sure somebody somewhere has invented an ASCII representation for
| solfa ...

When solfa first came up on this list, I did  a  bit  of  investigation,  and
found a number of sites that do solfa in ASCII. Unfortunately, no two of them
do it the same way.  I couldn't find any references to  software  that  dealt
explicitly with solfa; it's just printed as text.

This is quite similar to Chris Walshaw's story of how he  started  ABC  as  a
handwritten  notation.  Many people have mentioned using their own improvised
notation that is very similar.  ABC has  become  widely  used  because  Chris
started  storing  his  handwritten notes in his computer, and then decided to
try his hand at a program (abc2mtex) that converted  it  to  staff  notation.
Then  he  made the mistake of showing it to a few friends.  (And now he's the
leader of a cult ...  ;-)

This doesn't seem to have happened yet with solfa.  It works  ok  as  just  a
plain-text notation. Its various user groups don't interact much, and there's
no software that parses it, so the variants in the notation aren't a  serious
problem.   But  suppose  someone were to do something like Chris did.  Pick a
solfa variant and write some useful software for it.  There's a  good  chance
that it would spread among singers like ABC has among instrumentalists.

Anyone want to take on the mantle of leader in this?


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Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation

[Jack Campin]

> I'd like to propose a variant (to be signaled by a flag, say V:-, in the
> header) where whitespace within a measure becomes the delimiter for
> beats.  
>
> %Example 1
> M:2/4
> V:-
> | ab abcd |
>
> GROUPING, CONTINUATION and SUBDIVISION
> The above measure represents a group of 2 eighth-notes, ab, followed a
> group of 4 sixteenth notes.
>
> In this scheme, the dash or minus-sign would represent a continuation
> of the preceding pitch.

That's similar to what Curwen sol-fa does, except that sol-fa uses
proportional spacing to provide a visual backup for its implicit
coding of note length.  You would be better served by having a
translator from ABC to that than by inventing a third notation that
wasn't quite as good as either of those existing ones.

(I'm sure somebody somewhere has invented an ASCII representation for
solfa - not much point in a human using it directly, as solfa uses
kerning and non-ASCII characters to useful effect, but such a thing
might make a better target for a translator).


-
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
 * food intolerance data & recipes,
Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro".
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Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation

[Stephen Kellett]

In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Michael 
Ellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
Comments?
Main problem: You've used an existing symbol '-' to represent 2 
different things (in one place you call this "minus" and in another 
"dash") and that is in addition to the already existing use of this 
character in present ABC notation. Any ABC file written with your 
notation breaks any ABC software not updated to handle the additional 
interpretations of '-'.

Overloading of the same character adds complexity to parsers as well (as 
if they are not already complex enough). Also, humans are notorious for 
confusing dual use notations or writing the notation in a way that 
wasn't intended but appears OK to the writer (hence some strange and/or 
wrong constructs in many ABC files). Overloading the usage of a given 
character only increases this problem.

I wouldn't be surprised if your idea, as proposed, is a non-starter.
Choose some different characters and your notation could be added by 
those that wanted to support it. I think this would then make your 
proposal more attractive. Is "Tilde" ~ used? What about "equals" = ?

Stephen
--
Stephen Kellett
Object Media Limitedhttp://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk
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Re: [abcusers] Variant rhythmic notation

[Phil Taylor]

Michael,
as Ulf has pointed out, everything that you're trying to do here can 
already
be accomplished in abc, mainly by making use of the spaces between 
notes:

%Example 1
M:2/4
V:-
| ab abcd |
GROUPING, CONTINUATION and SUBDIVISION
The above measure represents a group of 2 eighth-notes, ab, followed a
group of 4 sixteenth notes.
M:2/4
L:1/16
K:C
| a2b2 abcd |

%Example 2
M:4/4
V:-
| ab a--b abc -efg |
The above measure has 4 beats:
The first, ab, is 2 eighths as in the prior example.
The second, a--b is a dotted-eighth and a sixteenth.
The third, abc, is triplet-sixteenths with the final c
tied to the first (normal) sixteenth of the fourth beat, which 
concludes
with 3 normal sixteenths.
M:4/4
L:1/8
K:C
| ab a>b (3abc- efg |
(that bar doesn't add up, by the way)
%Example 3
M:4/4
V:-
| b - ab - | - c - - |
Above we have a half-note b followed by an eighth a and an eighth b 
tied
to 2 quarters across the bar line followed by a dotted half c (or 3 
tied
quarters if you prefer to think of it that way).
M:4/4
L:1/8
K:C
| b2 ab- b2- | b2 c6 |
%Example 4
M:4/4
V:-
| 2abcde f g |
Above, the first two beats are subdivided into five notes, abcde.
M:4/4
L:1/8
K:C
| (5:4:5abcde f2g2 |
SUMMARY
I believe the variant proposed herein covers all rhythms expressible in
conventional notation.  Most important, it represents the rhythms as
subdivisions of uniform beats in the same manner as conventional
notation. I think this greatly improves the ease with which one can 
play
directly from the abc script.

As an extra benefit it is, in many instances, more compact than abc's
present conventions.
It might actually be easier to read, but it would take some time and
practice to find out.  Meantime, there's a whole corpus of music 
available
in standard abc, and quite a few people who can already read that just 
as
it is.  Changing it would be an awful lot of work for very little gain.

Phil Taylor
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