ABC Notation for Intellivision Music?

[+DZ-Jay]

I just discovered a fascinating new type of music notation that lends itself to easy human legibility and precise mechanical processing. It's called ABC Notation. Perhaps it's not new at all, but it's new to me.

 

I think this is the notation I shall implement in my own framework, since it allows me to score music the way that I think (i.e., musically), rather than the way the computer thinks (i.e., rows, ticks, etc.).

 

So, I was wondering if something like this could be implemented for IntyBASIC so that the tracker could be controlled automatically by defining musical scores in ABC notation. Or perhaps a "pre-processor" could be implemented that transcodes the ABC notation into IntyBASIC tracker data. I know it's a lot of work to implement this, but I think it would be very useful.

 

What do you think?

 

-dZ.

[GroovyBee]

ABC notation is useful, but many of the songs "out there" don't always translate well to a machine's limitations. Some years ago I wrote an ABC to Atari 2600 TIA converter for my own amusement. On some songs it sounded really bad (god-damn awful in fact) but that was more of a limitation of TIA's abilities than the music format.

[carlsson]

As a way to convey simple melodies in a text only format, I suppose ABC is good but as soon as you are trying to make something complex, like music with two or three parts, it starts to get hairy. I see that you can define each voice on its own, which to me would be a very unintuitive way of composing but perhaps there are WYSIWYG tools that output valid ABC syntax so one would not have to worry about getting the notes right?

 

Actually I think the ABC syntax is closer to Arnauld's tracker which works with patterns and subpatterns, one for each voice, than the IntyBASIC MUSIC command that reads all voices on the same line.

 

However I just recently made a PHP script that goes the other way around: splitting MOD output (which by nature is rather similar to the MUSIC command) into patterns compatible with the other tracker. I suppose it would not be rocket science to make an inverse of a such script, one that takes duration based, already voice splitted ABC data (in text form) and merges it into a MOD/MUSIC layout.

 

Another thing I've looked into is that MIDI files may have a text representation. Though it appears to work with microseconds and was not straightforward to deal with from the first look, it might be another field of interest if the goal is to have a "natural" way of composing music. Most programs working with traditional music notation will export MIDI, and if you could convert that data, a lot was gained.

 

I seem to recall there are MOD2MIDI tools. Perhaps there are MIDI2MOD tools as well, so you could have a chain of programs:

 

1. Compose music in a traditional program, if that is how you like it

2. Export as MIDI

3. Convert to MOD

4. Load MOD into a tracker and print to file (export to text)

5. Adjust printed content to match whichever music format you want to use

[+DZ-Jay]

Carlsson, I think you missed the point. A "more natural" way of composing musing means following hundreds of years of tradition and convention, such as what trained musicians learn in school: sheet music or the like.

 

In my opinion, this is what ABC offers: a more direct way of representing musical scores in sheet music for a computer to interpret.

 

MIDI, MOD, and the like are "more natural" if you are a computer. The only ones who compose music in these formats are computer people trained to follow the way software was designed and it's limitations.

 

For example, musicians talk about beats-per-minute, or relative speed; while programmers think in ticks, rows, and channel events.

 

I am a big proponent of making the computer do the translation and conversation, and not leak its abstractions to the user. For instance, why should I define my music speed in a value from 0 to 32? What does that mean? Any why do I have to tell the computer the length of a note in "ticks" when I could just say: 120 bpm, 4 beats to the measure, note length 1/4 beat. I suck at maths, the computer doesn't.

 

dZ.

[carlsson]

Sure, that is why I mentioned programs using traditional music notation and the option to export the result in a computer readable format. I bet there are programs in this category, whether they're Finale, Sibelius, NoteWorthy or one of the other million formats, that will read or write ABC music as well. I also mentioned the possibility of WYSIWYG tools designed specifically for ABC.

 

Actually it just struck me there is something else that we might look into: MusicXML! It has grown over the past decade or so, and an increasing number of programs support it. It will be far more verbose than ABC notation, but if you want to use a traditional music program chances are it will work with MusicXML files. How easy it is to convert those to an Intellivision usable format is another matter.

Edited January 24, 2017 by carlsson