ABC notation

ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with – , – , and , 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.…

ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with – , – , and , 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. 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 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 (using LilyPond's abc2ly ) code for the MediaWiki software renders this as: 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 |] While abcm2ps software produces output that looks like: More examples can be found on Chris Walshaw's ABC examples page, extensively displaying most ABC basic features, except rests, which would be denoted with z . ==See also== GUIDO music notation Helmholtz pitch notation LilyPond Numbered musical notation, widely used in China Tonic sol-fa ==References==

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1305113518 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.