abc Music Notation

Learning and playing traditional music is one of my favorite past-times; I play the pennywhistle and have made various attempts at Irish flute and Anglo concertina. As I am not a proficient sight-reader, the option of using a computer to help me in this process is something I find very valuable. abc music notation is my lingua franca.

In 1991, Englishman Chris Walshaw created abc, a notation language designed to write tunes in an text format. Since then, abc has become very popular and there now exist many computer-based tools which can read abc notation and either process it into staff notation or play it through the speakers of a computer.

http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/

Although it was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation, people almost immediately took advantage of its easy extensibility to tackle more complicated scores. The extreme example is Steve Allen's has coding of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Movement 2 into abc.

One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. With a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process or print it out. Even if this isn't of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes.

There have been a number of abc programs written to aid in the transcription, display, and playing of music in abc form. As a Macintosh computer user, I have been a big user of Phil Taylor's BarFly program -- one of the few that does all three of these essential functions. Other programs on other platforms have opted to excel in specific areas. Jean-François Moine's abcm2ps is a great program for creating Postscript tunebooks (which can fairly easily be converted to PDF). Since Mac OS X is Unix based, BarFly has built in hooks to pass files of abc tunes off to abcm2ps and macps2pdf (a library module of MacGhostView) to produce beautiful tunebooks. I've been involved with producing one such for the Syracuse Irish Session. The abc and abcPlus projects at SourceForge are a further excellent sources for abc software.

In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email. The exchange of abc tunes has become a major usage of some of the traditional music listservs such as IRTRAD-L, the Irish Traditional Music List. Sometimes you can find websites that collect these tunes from the various traditional music websites, but this approach is pretty haphazard.

Therefore, the aspect that excites me the most about abc are the various projects to index and catalog abc tune collections on the internet. The foremost example of an index is John Chamber's ABC Tune Finder. The Tune Finder has two parts, a web indexing robot used to discover tunes on the net and a set of perl scripts for displaying tunes in native abc notation or transcribing it on the fly to staff notation or playing it as a midi file.

While John Chamber's Tune Finder takes a distributed approach, indexing tunes rather than collecting them, Richard Moon's TUNEdb Traditional Music Database is a project to create a comprehensive database of traditional, largely Irish, music. An immediate advantage of this approach is the ability to manipulate the presentation of the data. One of the unique features of the TUNEdb is the ability to search for tunes that match a snippet of a tune, even finding transpositions that match.

Posted by Tom on September 25, 2003