Music Shorthand · 9:08am May 19th, 2015
I needed a shorthand music format for writing tunes and pony songs, so I made one. I've never been a fan of ABC for a few reasons, such as the forbidding of snippets, declaring any shorthand meaningless without a big dedicated file header, or such as the lack of support for quarter tones (they fixed that), triples (they fixed that too). I also have a dim opinion of sheet music, since it's a 400 year old format that isn't really very easy to encode textually, and if the new music format is easier to read and understand, why not just use that? So I don't make much use of the sheet music aspect of ABC, as contrary as that is to officialish musicians.
I wrote a basic parser, but don't really have a place to put the source. You could try my Tor site, if you use Tor...
The program sources... should work with pip
The MIDI file from the chapter's song
but this is pretty much it:
This is a general subset/ripoff of the abc music format from http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.0
except without all the lame requirements like a header and a file and
a key signature, and with support for some complex stuff like quarter
tones, relative volumes, and lack of support for pretty things like
rolls or segnos, or beaming.I probably should just slap a stock ABC header around the shorthand and
pass it to abcmidi.notes are identified by letters cdefgab. capital letters mean an
octave down. commas mean an octave down, single quotes mean an octave
up and they stack c,,, = really deepaccents are before the letter, ^ for sharp and _ for flat, or ^/ for
half sharp or _5/7 for wtf are you doing 5/7ths flat.so first the accent maybe, then the letter, then the octave maybe,
then the duration maybe, which is a fraction.
1 = 1 beat, 2 = 2 beats (twice as long) 1/2 = half a beat, etc
/ is short for 1/2 so c/ = an eighth note
no duration = 1 beatThere are no repeats, though it does have bars '|' for advisory
purposes. For repeats, write a program that loops over a repeat
lacking shorthand expression, and have the performers read that source
code.Brackets are used to indicate simultaneous things, like chords [ceg]
Slurs are like abc, except if inside a simultaneous section, in which
case they're sequential things played simultaneously. so like
ab(cde)f would be a slur, but a[b(cde)f] would be equivalent to
playing sequences acde, xbxx, xfxx at the same time. The midi parser
can't handle multiple simultaneous sequences, yet.Dynamics change the current expression's volume, generally abstract
values like p,pp,ppp,ff,etc. A number would work just as
well. Absolute, unless two ++ prefix. +pp+ (pianissimo -2) +f+
(mezzo-forte 1) +ff+ (forte 2) +fff+ (fortissimo 3) etc ++3+ (3 steps
louder) +pp+ ++3+ would be equivalent to +f+ but +p+ ++3+ would be
+ff+You can throw spaces in anywhere. Anything that doesn't match will
just be skipped.No lyrics. Pair lyrics programatically outside this shorthand, like
("ccggaag2",('twin-','kle','twin-','kle','lit-','tle','cookiemonster'))
or w/ev
...wut?
Gonna start with this: I love what you're doing here. I love seeing creative ways of keeping music (not the audio of the music, but the notes themselves). So props to you for actually trying to implement something. I mostly just wanted to address this:
Sheet music actually is amazing, from a formatting standpoint. It manages to convey a ridiculously high amount of information in a tiny snippet of visual space. The reason we haven't changed the format in hundreds of years is because it works REALLY well.
The difficulty with encapsulating it in text is actually precisely because sheet music is so efficient as a format: There's so much information in sheet music that you pretty much have to expand it massively to put it in text at all, even when that text is shorthand. The best of shorthand will never beat the efficiency and ease of reading that comes with sheet music. I would rave more about how awesome the development and history of sheet music actually is, and the practical uses that come out of it, but it would get very long-winded, and I doubt you really care that much. I mostly just wanted to point out that the difficulty in putting music into text form is largely an issue with music concepts being incredibly densely packed in the first place.
3080651 agreed, dinkie seems very knowledgeable in varied aspects of life, sadly i don't know the first thing about music, programming or anything he is talking about,it not only makes you feel dumb but kind of like you're missing part of the experience hahaha. plus the links don't work on my PC? maybe its just me.
I want to understand but I cannot, sadness but to hell with it. hope what ever you're doing works? yeah that sounds good enough.
3086720 I know hot to code, but not in assembly or any low level language. But, I know what you mean.