Abc notation is a standard for writing music using the ASCII character set. The standard was developed by Chris Walshaw in early 1991 and it has since been adopted widely for the distribution of traditional tunes, especially over the internet. Software to edit and manipulate music in abc notation are readily available on most computer systems including unix, Windows and Mac. The following is an example of the use of abc notation
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 |]
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 are more than one tune in a file (X:), the title (T:), the type of tune (R:), the time signature (M:), the default note length (L:) 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, abcm2ps software produces output that looks like the following image:
See either Chris Walshaw's abc notation site or Steve Mansfield's abc tutorial pages (links below) for more complete information about the current standard.
Collaborative abc
Recently abc has been implemented as a means of composing and editing music collections in collaborative environments. Several examples of Wiki environments that have been adapted to use abc are:
- MusicWiki, a Python plugin implementation for MoinMoin
- AbcMusic for displaying abc notation in PmWiki
- Traditional Music Wiki A collaborative source for traditional music using a tailored version of the AbcMusic plugin
- abc plugin for displaying abc notation in DokuWiki
External links
- TheSession.org is a community and database of Irish tunes and list of sessions, reliant on abc notation.
- Chris Walshaw's abc notation site
- Steve Mansfield's tutorial on abc notation
- Concertina.net Convert-O-Matic form to produce sheet music and midi files from abc
- Folkinfo Abc Converter form to produce sheet music, midi conversion, and transposition
- Online abc editor that can process multiple tunes
- John Chamber's ABC Tune Search Engine JC's Tune finder searches the net for ABC tunes
- Guido Gonzato's ABCplus page with a lot of software and documentation.
- TunePal An ABC retrieval and playback tool for the PocketPC.
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