I couldn't help but gawp at the clumsiness of the ABC music file. It tries to invent a whole new system of music text notation when really there is no need. There is a perfectly good text-based system of music notation. That system is sol-fa. Maybe someone already has used sol-fa in a music application and I've missed it but the application ABC does not appear to do so.
For those of you who didn't do sol-fa training as a kid let me explain. A sol-fa name just refers to the notes position in the scale. It doesn't indicate the absolute value in terms of pitch (eg A= 440 Mhz). Neither does a sol-fa name give any indication of the length of the note. These limitations were designed for a purpose. They were designed to attune the student's ear to relative pitch values.
Those of you who have no training in solf-a may remember Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music singing "Doe - a deer, a female deer. Ray - a golden drop of sun". Well that's Julie's little tutorial on sol-fa note names. The ascending scale is as follows:
doh re me fah so lah te doh
or for short
d r m f s l t d
Work out what nursery rhyme this is (answer at bottom of email):
d d s s l l s f f m m r r d s s f f m m r s s f f m m r d d s s l l s f f m m r r d
Its a great system for kids (and grown up beginners) who have yet to master music notation. Doh (or d for short) is always the first note in a major scale. However in a text-based notation system which uses the absolute names of notes the letter d might be the first note of the scale - or the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth or so on. Eventually a music student will have to come to grips with this, just as they'll have to come to terms with the complexities of rhythmic notation but sol-fa training will focus training on pitch and pitch sequences alone.
By the by does this should make it easier for the application developer. I'm no programmer but I would have thought that musical notation is bound to entail complexity. However in this system all you need is text. Sometimes limitations are a plus. Forget graphics. Embrace text. Tiny little kids learn this system with ease. They learn sol-fa names to the songs they can already sing. Highly accomplished students in music conservatoires also use sol-fa to practice their sight-reading. Maybe I'm alone but I hope that one day I'll find a music application that mixes today's wizardry with yesterday's tried and tested teaching methods.
Cheers
By the way the nursery rhyme is Ba Ba Black Sheep.