Re: Help? Asciification of musical language

Sally Caves scripsit:

> When I think of a tune and I'm away from my piano, I write it down
> with small letters for the base and capitals for the treble (I use
> a two octave scale usually), with sharps and flats in front of them;
There actually is a historic standard for this, and it's just the reverse:
capitals for the lower octave, small letters for the higher one.  To
add more octaves, add apostrophes (really "prime" marks), so A'' is below
A' is below A is below a is below a' is below a''.

What I haven't been able to find out is exactly which octave contains A.
In the abc music transcription standard, C = middle C, and low octaves
are written A, instead of A'.

The wonderful thing about abc is that it starts just as simple as
writing cdec cdec efg2 efg2, and then has extensions that make it possible
to notate just about any piece of (Western-scale) music.  Furthermore,
there are tools that translate abc notation to Postscript files (and
thence to PDF) showing a conventional score, and *other* tools that
translate it to MIDI format for performance on a computer.

abc tutorial: http://www.lesession.co.uk/abc/abc_notation.htm .
abc home page: http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/ .

Beethoven's 7th (2nd movement, one of my favorite Beethoven pieces)
in abc, with MIDI, Postscript, and PDF, an amazing tour de force:
http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/abcmusic/sym7mov2.html .

--
You let them out again, Old Man Willow!                 John Cowan
What you be a-thinking of?  You should not be waking!   jcowan@reutershealth.com
Eat earth!  Dig deep!  Drink water!  Go to sleep!       www.reutershealth.com
Bombadil is talking.                                    www.ccil.org/~cowan