Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rice!brazos!rich From: rich@Rice.edu (Carey Richard Murphey) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: need advice on choosing a typewritten notation Message-ID: Date: 8 Jul 90 19:16:44 GMT References: <1641@yenta.alb.nm.us> Sender: root@rice.edu Reply-To: Rich@Rice.edu (Rich Murphey) Distribution: comp Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University Lines: 46 In-reply-to: dt@yenta.alb.nm.us's message of 7 Jul 90 09:23:21 GMT In article <1641@yenta.alb.nm.us> dt@yenta.alb.nm.us (David B. Thomas) writes: I have rather a humbler objective. I would like to develop or use an existing system of representing music in ascii format. David points out some good objectives for an ascii representation -- one is standardization. Two other objectives for the format should be readability and ease of parsing. Using _ and = is attractive since it saves keystrokes and makes parsing easy. However, you run out of special characters as you add other note durations to the list, so you will eventually need an additional form to indicate numerically the duration of the note (e.g. 3/128 th note). The octave relative to middle C could be indicated by a digit in front of the note name: 0C is middle C -1C is one octave below 1C is one octave above This would avoid context sensitivity. The duration could be indicated by either special characters or numeric values after the note name: C' or C1/2 for a half C` or C1/3 for a third C= or C1/4 for a quarter note C- or C1/8 for a eighth note C+ or C1/16 for a sixteenth note The concatenation of several durations would represent the sum of their seperate durations. Sharp and flat could be indicated by the characters # and b respectively front of the note name (which would be a capital letter). Length, note, and octave seem to be the types of data we need to represent, and this is just the `tip of the iceberg'. If there were a standard to follow, we would have an easier time of developing the software to manipulate it. I'd like to develop something to assist entering music using GNU emacs, and a translator to MuTeX in order to typeset melodies. I'll eventually post something to the net.... If there isn't an ascii format, perhaps there are a few binary or text formats which have addressed similar problems. So far, MuTeX is the only text format I've seen, and it doesn't seem to be very well-known. Rich -- Rich@Rice.edu