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ABC notation

April 10, 2024

ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with a–g, A–G, and z, to represent the corresponding notes and rests, with other elements used to place added value on these – sharp, flat, raised or lowered octave, the note length, key, and ornamentation. This form of notation began from a combination of Helmholtz pitch notation and using ASCII characters to imitate standard musical notation (bar lines, tempo marks, etc.) that could facilitate the sharing of music online, and also added a new and simple language for software developers, not unlike other notations designed for ease, such as tablature and solfège.

ABC notation
Filename extension
.abc
Internet media type
text/vnd.abc
Developed byChris Walshaw
Initial releaseJanuary 1997; 27 years ago (1997-01)
Latest release
2.1
December 2011; 12 years ago (2011-12)
Type of formatmusical notation
Open format?Yes
Websiteabcnotation.com

The earlier ABC notation was built on, standardized, and changed by Chris Walshaw to better fit the keyboard and an ASCII character set, with the help and input of others. Originally designed to encode folk and traditional Western European tunes (e.g., from England, Ireland, and Scotland) which are typically single-voice melodies that can be written in standard notation on a single staff line, the extensions by Walshaw and others has opened this up with an increased list of characters and headers in a syntax that can also support metadata for each tune.[1]

ABC notation being ASCII-based, any text editor can be used to create and edit the encoding. Even so, there are now many ABC notation software packages available that offer a wide variety of features, including the ability to read and process ABC notation into MIDI files and as standard "dotted" notation. Such software is readily available for most computer systems, including Microsoft Windows, Unix / Linux, Macintosh, Palm OS, and web-based.[2]

Later third-party software packages have provided direct output, bypassing the TeX typesetter,[3] and have extended the syntax to support lyrics aligned with notes,[4] multi-voice and multi-staff notation,[5] tablature,[6] and MIDI.[7]

History edit

ABC notation was in widespread use in the teaching of Irish traditional music in the late 1970s and most probably much earlier than that. In the 1980s Chris Walshaw began writing out fragments of folk / traditional tunes using letters to represent the notes before he learned standard Western music notation. Later he began using MusicTeX to notate French bagpipe music. To reduce the tedium of writing the MusicTeX code, he wrote a front-end for generating the TeX commands, which by 1993 evolved into the abc2mtex program.[8] For more details see Chris Walshaw's short history of ABC[9] and John Chambers's chronology of ABC notation and software.[10]

Standardization edit

The most recent standard for ABC was released 21 December 2011.[11] It is a textual description of ABC syntax, cleaning up many of the ambiguities of the 2.0 Draft Standard, which, in turn, was grown from the 1996 User Guide of version 1.6 of Chris Walshaw's original "abc2mtex". program. In 1997, Henrik Norbeck published a Backus–Naur form (BNF).[12]

In 1997, Steve Allen registered the text/vnd.abc MIME media type with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA),[13] but registration as a top level MIME type would require a formal Request for Comments (RFC).[14] In 2006 Phil Taylor reported that quite a few websites still serve ABC files as text/plain.[15]

In 1999, Chris Walshaw started work on a new version of the ABC specification to standardize the extensions that had been developed in various third-party tools. After much discussion on the ABC users mailing list, a draft standard (nominal version 1.7.6) was eventually produced in August 2000, but was never officially released.[16] Thereafter, Chris stepped away for several years from actively developing ABC.[17]

Guido Gonzato later compiled a new version of the specification and published a draft of version 2.0. This specification is now maintained by Irwin Oppenheim. Henrik Norbeck has also published a corresponding BNF specification.[18]

After a surge of renewed interest in clarifying some ambiguities in the 2.0 draft and suggestions for new features, serious discussion of a new (and official) standard resumed in 2011, culminating in the release of ABC 2.1 as a new standard in late December 2011. Chris Walshaw has become involved again and is coordinating the effort to further improve and clarify the language, with plans for topics to be addressed in future versions to be known as ABC 2.2 and ABC 2.3 .

Example edit

The following is an example of the use of ABC notation in MediaWiki. 

<score lang="ABC"> X:1 T:The Legacy Jig M:6/8 L:1/8 R:jig K:G GFG BAB | gfg gab | GFG BAB | d2A AFD | GFG BAB | gfg gab | age edB |1 dBA AFD :|2 dBA ABd |: efe edB | dBA ABd | efe edB | gdB ABd | efe edB | d2d def | gfe edB |1 dBA ABd :|2 dBA AFD |] </score>

Lines in the first part of the tune notation, beginning with a letter followed by a colon, indicate various aspects of the tune such as the index, when there is more than one tune in a file (X:), the title (T:), the time signature (M:), the default note length (L:), the type of tune (R:) and the key (K:). Lines following the key designation represent the tune. This example can be translated into traditional music notation using one of the ABC conversion tools. For example, the Score extension (using LilyPond's abc2ly) code for the MediaWiki software renders this as:

 

While abcm2ps software produces output that looks like:

 

More examples can be found on Chris Walshaw's ABC examples page,[19] extensively displaying most ABC basic features, except rests, which would be denoted with z.

Collaborative ABC edit

Recently, ABC has been implemented as a means of composing and editing music in collaborative environments. Some Wiki environments that have been adapted to use ABC are:

  • The Wiki-score platform for collaborative, large-scale score editing uses ABC as base notation.
  • The Score plugin for MediaWiki. This uses GNU LilyPond as the underlying rendering engine. LilyPond comes packaged with a script, abc2ly, that converts ABC notation to LilyPond. The extension calls abc2ly then LilyPond.
  • MusicWiki, a Python plugin implementation for MoinMoin wikis
  • AbcMusic for displaying ABC notation in PmWiki
  • Montreal Session Tune Book. collaborative source for traditional music using a tailored version of the AbcMusic plugin
  • The gabc notation, developed by the Gregorio Project for transcriptions of Gregorian chant scores
  • ABC plugin for displaying ABC notation in DokuWiki. This plugin uses Jef Moine's abcm2ps package as the rendering engine. It optionally uses abc2MIDI (available from the ABC Plus Project) to produce MIDI audio output.
  • EasyABC is an ABC-editor that supports MIDI export and SVG rendering.
  • abcjs plugin for displaying ABC notation on any web page. This allows ABC to be stored as text on the server and rendered client-side.
  • Zap's ABC is an Android application combining abcm2ps, abc2midi, and a bit of abc4j into a tool for composing.
  • The multiplayer game The Lord of the Rings Online now uses the ABC notation to allow players to convert and play any MIDI music file in-game. The players play the music by having their character play the corresponding instrument.
  • The PC game Starbound allows players to use in-game instruments to play custom music.

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Walshaw, Chris. "Introduction". abcnotation.com. abc music notation. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  2. ^ Walshaw, Chris. "History". abcnotation.org.uk. abc music notation. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  3. ^ Vint, Jim. "ABC2Win shareware music notation program". abc2win.com. from the original on 4 March 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  4. ^ Methfessel, Michael. "ABC2PS". ihp-ffo.de (personal webpage). The Institute for Semiconductor Physics. from the original on 12 February 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  5. ^ Moine, Jean-François. "abcm2ps". Jef's page. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  6. ^ Dalitz, Christoph. "abctab2ps". Lauten Gesellschaft. from the original on 6 February 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  7. ^ Allwright, James. "abcMIDI". abc.sourceforge.net. from the original on 9 March 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  8. ^ Walshaw, Chris. "Software". abc music notation. abcnotation.org.uk. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  9. ^ Walshaw, Chris. "A brief history of abc". abcnotation.com. Retrieved 25 November 2017.
  10. ^ Chambers, John. "History". abc music notation. MIT. Retrieved 25 November 2017.
  11. ^ "The abc music standard 2.1". 21 December 2011. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
  12. ^ Norbeck, Henrik. . Archived from the original on 9 March 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  13. ^ "Registration of MIME media type text/vnd.abc". Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  14. ^ Allen, Steve. "ABC as a MIME type". Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  15. ^ Taylor, Phil. "abcusers: Re: ABC on the web" (Yahoo discussion group). Archived from the original on 30 June 2012. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  16. ^ Walshaw, Chris. . abcnotation.org.uk. abc music notation. Archived from the original on 21 July 2009. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  17. ^ Walshaw, Chris. "Further information". abcnotation.org.uk. abc music notation. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  18. ^ Oppenheim, Irwin. "The ABC music standard". from the original on 21 February 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
  19. ^ "Examples". ABCNotation.com. abc music notation. Retrieved 12 March 2019.
 
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April 10, 2024
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This article has multiple issues Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page Learn how and when to remove these template messages This article relies excessively on references to primary sources Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources Find sources ABC notation news newspapers books scholar JSTOR August 2015 Learn how and when to remove this template message Some of this article s listed sources may not be reliable Please help improve this article by looking for better more reliable sources Unreliable citations may be challenged and removed August 2015 Learn how and when to remove this template message Learn how and when to remove this template message ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers In basic form it uses the letter notation with a g A G and z to represent the corresponding notes and rests with other elements used to place added value on these sharp flat raised or lowered octave the note length key and ornamentation This form of notation began from a combination of Helmholtz pitch notation and using ASCII characters to imitate standard musical notation bar lines tempo marks etc that could facilitate the sharing of music online and also added a new and simple language for software developers not unlike other notations designed for ease such as tablature and solfege ABC notationFilename extension abcInternet media typetext vnd abcDeveloped byChris WalshawInitial releaseJanuary 1997 27 years ago 1997 01 Latest release2 1December 2011 12 years ago 2011 12 Type of formatmusical notationOpen format YesWebsiteabcnotation wbr comThe earlier ABC notation was built on standardized and changed by Chris Walshaw to better fit the keyboard and an ASCII character set with the help and input of others Originally designed to encode folk and traditional Western European tunes e g from England Ireland and Scotland which are typically single voice melodies that can be written in standard notation on a single staff line the extensions by Walshaw and others has opened this up with an increased list of characters and headers in a syntax that can also support metadata for each tune 1 ABC notation being ASCII based any text editor can be used to create and edit the encoding Even so there are now many ABC notation software packages available that offer a wide variety of features including the ability to read and process ABC notation into MIDI files and as standard dotted notation Such software is readily available for most computer systems including Microsoft Windows Unix Linux Macintosh Palm OS and web based 2 Later third party software packages have provided direct output bypassing the TeX typesetter 3 and have extended the syntax to support lyrics aligned with notes 4 multi voice and multi staff notation 5 tablature 6 and MIDI 7 Contents 1 History 1 1 Standardization 2 Example 3 Collaborative ABC 4 See also 5 ReferencesHistory editABC notation was in widespread use in the teaching of Irish traditional music in the late 1970s and most probably much earlier than that In the 1980s Chris Walshaw began writing out fragments of folk traditional tunes using letters to represent the notes before he learned standard Western music notation Later he began using a href MusiXTeX html title MusiXTeX MusicTeX a to notate French bagpipe music To reduce the tedium of writing the MusicTeX code he wrote a front end for generating the TeX commands which by 1993 evolved into the abc2mtex program 8 For more details see Chris Walshaw s short history of ABC 9 and John Chambers s chronology of ABC notation and software 10 Standardization edit The most recent standard for ABC was released 21 December 2011 11 It is a textual description of ABC syntax cleaning up many of the ambiguities of the 2 0 Draft Standard which in turn was grown from the 1996 User Guide of version 1 6 of Chris Walshaw s original style mw parser output cite citation font style inherit word wrap break word mw parser 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clientpref os mw parser output cs1 visible error html skin theme clientpref os mw parser output cs1 hidden error color f8a397 html skin theme clientpref os mw parser output cs1 maint color 18911F style cite class citation web cs1 abc2mtex cite span title ctx ver Z39 88 2004 amp rft val fmt info 3Aofi 2Ffmt 3Akev 3Amtx 3Abook amp rft genre unknown amp rft btitle abc2mtex amp rft id http 3A 2F 2Fabcnotation com 2Fabc2mtex 2F amp rfr id info 3Asid 2Fen wikipedia org 3AABC notation class Z3988 span program In 1997 Henrik Norbeck published a Backus Naur form BNF 12 In 1997 Steve Allen registered the text vnd abc MIME media type with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority IANA 13 but registration as a top level MIME type would require a formal Request for Comments RFC 14 In 2006 Phil Taylor reported that quite a few websites still serve ABC files as text plain 15 In 1999 Chris Walshaw started work on a new version of the ABC specification to standardize the extensions that had been developed in various third party tools After much discussion on the ABC users mailing list a draft standard nominal version 1 7 6 was eventually produced in August 2000 but was never officially released 16 Thereafter Chris stepped away for several years from actively developing ABC 17 Guido Gonzato later compiled a new version of the specification and published a draft of version 2 0 This specification is now maintained by Irwin Oppenheim Henrik Norbeck has also published a corresponding BNF specification 18 After a surge of renewed interest in clarifying some ambiguities in the 2 0 draft and suggestions for new features serious discussion of a new and official standard resumed in 2011 culminating in the release of ABC 2 1 as a new standard in late December 2011 Chris Walshaw has become involved again and is coordinating the effort to further improve and clarify the language with plans for topics to be addressed in future versions to be known as ABC 2 2 and ABC 2 3 Example editThe following is an example of the use of ABC notation in MediaWiki lt score lang ABC gt X 1 T The Legacy Jig M 6 8 L 1 8 R jig K G GFG BAB gfg gab GFG BAB d2A AFD GFG BAB gfg gab age edB 1 dBA AFD 2 dBA ABd efe edB dBA ABd efe edB gdB ABd efe edB d2d def gfe edB 1 dBA ABd 2 dBA AFD lt score gt Lines in the first part of the tune notation beginning with a letter followed by a colon indicate various aspects of the tune such as the index when there is more than one tune in a file X the title T the time signature M the default note length L the type of tune R and the key K Lines following the key designation represent the tune This example can be translated into traditional music notation using one of the ABC conversion tools For example the Score extension using LilyPond s abc2ly code for the MediaWiki software renders this as nbsp source Audio playback is not supported in your browser You can download the audio file While abcm2ps software produces output that looks like nbsp More examples can be found on Chris Walshaw s ABC examples page 19 extensively displaying most ABC basic features except rests which would be denoted with z Collaborative ABC editRecently ABC has been implemented as a means of composing and editing music in collaborative environments Some Wiki environments that have been adapted to use ABC are The Wiki score platform for collaborative large scale score editing uses ABC as base notation The Score plugin for MediaWiki This uses GNU LilyPond as the underlying rendering engine LilyPond comes packaged with a script abc2ly that converts ABC notation to LilyPond The extension calls abc2ly then LilyPond MusicWiki a Python plugin implementation for MoinMoin wikis AbcMusic for displaying ABC notation in PmWiki Montreal Session Tune Book collaborative source for traditional music using a tailored version of the AbcMusic plugin The gabc notation developed by the Gregorio Project for transcriptions of Gregorian chant scores ABC plugin for displaying ABC notation in DokuWiki This plugin uses Jef Moine s abcm2ps package as the rendering engine It optionally uses abc2MIDI available from the ABC Plus Project to produce MIDI audio output EasyABC is an ABC editor that supports MIDI export and SVG rendering abcjs plugin for displaying ABC notation on any web page This allows ABC to be stored as text on the server and rendered client side Zap s ABC is an Android application combining abcm2ps abc2midi and a bit of abc4j into a tool for composing The multiplayer game The Lord of the Rings Online now uses the ABC notation to allow players to convert and play any MIDI music file in game The players play the music by having their character play the corresponding instrument The PC game Starbound allows players to use in game instruments to play custom music See also editGUIDO music notation Helmholtz pitch notation LilyPond Numbered musical notation widely used in China Tonic sol faReferences edit Walshaw Chris Introduction abcnotation com abc music notation Retrieved 1 March 2008 Walshaw Chris History abcnotation org uk abc music notation Retrieved 1 March 2008 Vint Jim ABC2Win shareware music notation program abc2win com Archived from the original on 4 March 2008 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Methfessel Michael ABC2PS ihp ffo de personal webpage The Institute for Semiconductor Physics Archived from the original on 12 February 2008 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Moine Jean Francois abcm2ps Jef s page Retrieved 1 March 2008 Dalitz Christoph abctab2ps Lauten Gesellschaft Archived from the original on 6 February 2008 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Allwright James abcMIDI abc sourceforge net Archived from the original on 9 March 2008 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Walshaw Chris Software abc music notation abcnotation org uk Retrieved 1 March 2008 Walshaw Chris A brief history of abc abcnotation com Retrieved 25 November 2017 Chambers John History abc music notation MIT Retrieved 25 November 2017 The abc music standard 2 1 21 December 2011 Retrieved 21 December 2011 Norbeck Henrik ABC 1 6 in BNF format Archived from the original on 9 March 2008 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Registration of MIME media type text vnd abc Retrieved 1 March 2008 Allen Steve ABC as a MIME type Retrieved 1 March 2008 Taylor Phil abcusers Re ABC on the web Yahoo discussion group Archived from the original on 30 June 2012 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Walshaw Chris Learning abcnotation org uk abc music notation Archived from the original on 21 July 2009 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Walshaw Chris Further information abcnotation org uk abc music notation Retrieved 1 March 2008 Oppenheim Irwin The ABC music standard Archived from the original on 21 February 2008 Retrieved 1 March 2008 Examples ABCNotation com abc music notation Retrieved 12 March 2019 nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to ABC notation Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title ABC notation amp oldid 1192192899, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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