Re: ASCII Music Notation?

Many People Wrote [and I snipped]:
  In some decades, I find three kinds of ASCII music:

  1.  That intended to be played by a program such as POLYPHON.EXE after the
ASCII has been compiled (or not) by such as MAKEPOLY.EXE.  It's code, in which
a few characters do all the work.
  Follows a clip from a compilable file GOLLYWOG.SNG:

*
Debussy, Claude.  "golliwogg's cake-walk," from the Children's Corner 
     Suite.  London:  United Music Publishers Ltd, 1918, 1968, P.D.
     D. & F. 7188 (VI)
Transcribed for GrigaSoft Productions' Polyphonic Music Compiler v.1.10 
Transcription file (C) 1991 by Dennis M. Hammes.
*
* NB:  SIG= function is not implemented in MAKEPOLY.EXE v.1.10. *
* SIG= -b -e -a  *
* allegro giusto *

t4896

*1*
v1o3 l16 >b- a-32r.   b- f32r.  b-32r.  a- f8  e-   <b4
v2o2     >b- a-32r.   b- f32r.  b-32r.  a- f8  e-   <b4
v3o1      r2                            r2

*3*
v1o3  r  a-  f  e-  <b4    r  a-  f  e-  <b8   >g32r.   r2
v2o2  r  a-  f  e-  <b4    r  a-  f  e-  <b8   >b-32r.  r2
v3o1  r2                   r4             r8   <b-32r.  r2

*6*
v1o3  r8     <b-32r. r8      b-32r32  b-32r32  r8      b-32r. r8      b-32r.
v2o2 <b-32r. >g32r. <b-32r. >g32r.            <b-32r. >g32r. <b-32r. >g32r.
v3o1  e-32r. >f32r. <e-32r. >f32r.            <e-32r. >f32r. <e-32r. >f32r.

...(about 16 pages).
  Here, r=rest, the 13 notes are given by their letter names and + or - for
sharp or flat, and the quantity by 1,2,4,8,16,32,etc.  v=voice (the prog will
play three tones simultaneously on the PC speaker), o=octave, adjusted in the
line by <=octave down, >=octave up.  The spacing is ignored by the compiler;
it allows the author /barely/ to make out where the notes go when he's writing
them.  *Brackets non-complied comments (gotta have or get lost).*
  It's too bad the old programs no longer work because our new machines are
too fast and timechopping actually cuts some of the octaves out of the
resulting music.  Sounded pretty dang good at 8MHz in 1989, just tolerable at
40MHz, and utterly impossible at 333MHz.  Would have to rewrite and recompile
the player to manage timeslicing differently, i.e., on the realtime clock not
the CPU clock.
  Still better would be to rewrite and compile so that such a file drove a
modern sound card -- and this is essentially what such progs do today whether
they use this sort of code or other.
  Point is that this sort of ASCII text is essentially impossible to sightread
on the piano (been there).

  2.  Drawing ASCII pictures of traditional sheet music.  As a musician, I can
report that all the attempts in the thread are (sorry, really) unuseable as
readable music notation, though many elements do work or can be tweaked.  But
traditional sheet music is also a code.  Thus the trick is to develop an
/ASCII code/ that looks enough like sheet music as to be pretty
self-explanatory, as ASCII just won't draw the pictures as commercially
printed (hand-authored music is often not immediately legible to any but the
guy who wrote it because his code differs in degree from the commercial
standard).
  One /can not/ use different symbols for "note on a line" and "note on a
space." Thus, one /must/ use the hyphen for the line so the note symbol lands
on not above the line, and one /must/ have a blank line between lines so the
symbol can land in the space.  Means doublespacing, and that gets large in a
hurry.  Point is that it's already hard enough to read the existing 1.5" high
double staff in commercially-printed music, so one can't well spread the
pictures of the notes much vertically so that they have the proportions of
printed music in the ASCII staff; the symbol is too broken up to be
immediately legible, and the idea is to be decoding the /music/, not spending
one's time decoding the /pictures/.
  (Tablature is much easier as there are no spaces, and notes can be indicated
by duration numbers alone -- which might not be a bad idea for sheet music,
either, save that it will look "even less like music."  As a code, however...)
  If you accept the doublespacing, many of the offered symbols will work, but
they must be kept as simple as possible, one ASCII character wherever
possible.  May I suggest d\\=16th, d\=8th, d=quarter, o=half, O=whole.
  Clefs are G:, C:, F:.  Sharps are # or + (+ is better because simpler) and
flats are - (this is code, and one is stuck with the codes on the keyboard;
drawing a picture of sheet music e.g. thus:  bd=flatted quarter, confuses the
code).  Extant code puts the accidental before the note, so +d\ is a sharped
8th, -d a flatted 4ter.
  Dynamics are simple enough if coded:  <, >, ^, u (medium accent), z (code:
szforzando), . (stacatto or time-dot).  f, ff, p, mp, etc. already exist.
  While doublespacing spreads the screen picture and nothing can be done about
it (you'll go snowblind looking at the whitespace, and that's that), one can
set any printer to print, say, 12 lines/inch instead of 6, and squeeze down
the vertical spacing w/o losing legibility.

  3.  Drawing "real" sheet music.  Several progs do this today and author MIDI
or WAV files in the process.  Of course, it's no longer "ASCII" music, it's
standard-code sheet music.  CakeWalk Studio PRO is probably the best
all-around, though SoundForge gives more detailed control over WAV generation
(MIDI sound quality is entirely up to the sound card it's being played, not
written, on).  Unfortunately for the sometime-artist, these progs are plain
spendy, running around $400 for the fuller packages.

  For composers who want to "trade notes" in e-mail, method #2 is the only one
that offers any promise.  Once originated, useage will quickly modify it to a
standard form (happened with traditional notation, too).  But you can /not/
expect a composer to spend his time drawing pictures; he'll use a code, and
the faster the better, reading it the same way.
  For drawing ASCII art involving music but not intended to be music, you can
pretty much do what you want.
-- 
  >^,,^<
The number you have reached is imaginary.
 Rotate your screen 90 degrees and reconnect.
http://blitz.org/fishhook/

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