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abc is a language designed to notate music - tunes and lyrics - in an ascii format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin (such as English, Irish and Scottish) which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation. However, it is extendible to many other types of music, and has been used for jazz and other forms. Since its introduction at the end of 1991 by Chris Walshaw it has become very popular and there now exist several Windows, Macintosh Palmtop and UNIX based tools which can read abc notation and either process it into staff notation or play it through the speakers of a computer.
A primary of abc notation is to be human readable and writeable while being as compact as possible. In fact, it is possible to play directly from the abc notation.
The early ABC-programs made use of the commonly available tools like TeX and MusicTeX. A conversion tool abc2ps made abc-notation more easily available on common PC's where GhostScript came to rescue. Now there are tools that interactively produce music notation as the notes are entered, including Java versions, and versions which allow notation to be generated directly from input forms on the web. Abc notation tools are available under various licenses, including open source forms. A number of non abc native tools support export and import of abc notation, including import of MusicXML.
A unique feature of abc notation tools is the ability to manage tunebooks as well as individual tunes. Many thousands of abc tunes are freely available (see link to Tune Finder below).
ABC-notation is one of the more likely candidates to be incorporated in the MediaWiki software for typesetting music.
X:1
T:Paddy O'Rafferty
C:Trad.
L:1/8
M:6/8
K:D
dff cee|def gfe|dff cee|dfe dBA|dff cee|def gfe|faf gfe|1 dfe dBA:|2 dfe dcB||
~A3 B3|gfe fdB|AFA B2c|dfe dcB|~A3 ~B3|efe efg|faf gfe|1 dfe dcB:|2 dfe dBA||
fAA eAA|def gfe|fAA eAA|dfe dBA|fAA eAA|def gfe|faf gfe|dfe dBA:|
The lines starting with an uppercase letter and a colon are called the header and describe
Index,Title, Composer, default note Length, Meter, and Key.
The other four lines describe the notes. A number after a note multiplies the duration (default 1/8, or as specified in the L: field).
Barlines are specified with the vertical bar |, while repeats and first and second endings are
signified with |: (forward repeat), :| (backward repeat), |1 and :|2 respectively.
Many abc tools support an enhanced version of abc that allows for multiple voices, additional clefs,
enhanced markup, enhanced tuplet handling, and lyrics aligned with the notation, among
other things. Standardization of these extensions is an ongoing process.
External links
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