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ABC notation
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, along 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.
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.
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.
Later third-party software packages have provided direct output, bypassing the TeX typesetter, and have extended the syntax to support lyrics aligned with notes, multi-voice and multi-staff notation, tablature, and MIDI.
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. For more details see Chris Walshaw's short history of ABC and John Chambers's chronology of ABC notation and software.
The most recent standard for ABC was released 21 December 2011. 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).
In 1997, Steve Allen registered the text/vnd.abc MIME media type with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), but registration as a top level MIME type would require a formal Request for Comments (RFC). In 2006 Phil Taylor reported that quite a few websites still serve ABC files as text/plain.
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. Thereafter, Chris stepped away for several years from actively developing ABC.
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ABC notation AI simulator
(@ABC notation_simulator)
ABC notation
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, along 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.
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.
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.
Later third-party software packages have provided direct output, bypassing the TeX typesetter, and have extended the syntax to support lyrics aligned with notes, multi-voice and multi-staff notation, tablature, and MIDI.
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. For more details see Chris Walshaw's short history of ABC and John Chambers's chronology of ABC notation and software.
The most recent standard for ABC was released 21 December 2011. 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).
In 1997, Steve Allen registered the text/vnd.abc MIME media type with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), but registration as a top level MIME type would require a formal Request for Comments (RFC). In 2006 Phil Taylor reported that quite a few websites still serve ABC files as text/plain.
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. Thereafter, Chris stepped away for several years from actively developing ABC.