ABC notation is more oriented towards traditional sheet music, with regular note lengths, standard Western tuning and a simple, readable syntax. It isn't meant for playing back music that sounds good to the ear. It's hard to catch the nuances of a real human performance with it, but it works well as a lead sheet for musicians. Its expressive marking are relatively limited and interpreted subjectively.
MTXT focuses on editable recordings of live performances, preserving all of those tiny irregularities that make the music human. It can represent arbitrary timings, subtle expressive variations and even arbitrary tuning systems. MTXT can also capture transitions like crescendos and accelerandos exactly as they happened.
\relative c' {
\key d
\major
fis4 fis g a
a g fis e
d d e fis
fis4. e8 e2
}
...but why is it so complicated? A novice interpretation of "music" is "a bunch of notes!" ... my amateur interpretation of "music" is "layers of notes".
You can either spam 100 notes in a row, or you effectively end up with:
melody = [ a, b, [c+d], e, ... ]
bassline = [ b, _, b, _, ... ]
music = melody + bassline
score = [
"a bunch of helper text",
+ melody,
+ bassline,
+ page_size, etc...
]
...so Lilypond basically made "Tex4Music", and the format serves a few dual purposes:
Engraving! Basically "typesetting" the music for human eyeballs (ie: `*.ly` => `*.pdf`).
Rendering! Basically "playing" the music for human ears (ie: `*.ly` => `*.mid`)
Librarification! Basically, if your music format has "variables" and "for-loops", you can end up with an end score that's something like: `song = [ intro + chorus + bridge + chorus + outro ]`, and then not have to chase down and modify all the places you use `chorus` when you modify it. (See this answer for more precision: https://music.stackexchange.com/a/130894 )
...now imagine doing all of the above for multiple instruments and parceling out `guitar.pdf`, `bass.pdf`, `drums.pdf` and `whole-song.pdf`
TL;DR: Music is haaard, and a lot closer to programming than you think!
Cool. My one concern with this is that it has no horizontally scannable note/chord mode. It’s super common for humans to read a sequence of notes left to right, or write it that way, but it’s also just more efficient in terms of scanning / reading.
Can I suggest a guarded mode that specifies how far apart each given note/chord is by the count, e.g.
#1.0:verse1
Am - C - G - E - F F F F
#
You could then repeat this or overlay a melody line like
I considered it but decided against it in the first version, because specifying note durations is too tricky. It was more important to get the .mid -> MTXT conversion and live-performance recording working, where notes usually have irregular note lengths.
Representations like "C4 0.333 D4 0.333 E4 0.25" feel too hard to read.
That's why I decided to allow arbitrary order within the file. In this way you can group notes by instruments and the parser will deal with reordering them.
I also plan to create a flag for the CLI tool that reorders the lines within the mtxt file in such way, that notes are grouped by instruments.
I feel that one challenge of programming languages is how to remember these rules, formats, and keywords. Even if you're using familiar formats like YAML or JSON, how do you match keywords?
When developing Glicol (http://glicol.org/), I found that if it's based on an audio graph, all node inputs and outputs are all signals, which at least reduces the matching problems. The remaining challenge is ensuring that reference documentation is available at the minimal cost.
This made me remember old set of tools called mtx2midi and midi2mtx, I used them to edit some midi files while making sure I'm not introducing any unwanted changes.
While roundtrip output was not binary identical, it still sounded the same.
Looks like MTXT tool here does not quite work for this use case, the result of the roundtrip of a midi I tried has a segment folded over, making two separate segments play at the same time while the total duration got shorter.
My initial goal was to fix some mistakes in the MIDI files I recorded from my keyboard. I was also interested in making dynamic tempo and expression changes without dealing with complicated DAW GUIs.
Now I'm working on a synth that uses MTXT as its first-class recording format, and it's also pushing me to fine-tune a language model on it.
I like the idea overall. Looks like something that would be fun to combine with music programming languages (SuperCollider/Of etc).
Not so sure how human-friendly the fractional beats are? Is that something that people more into music than I am are comfortable with? I would have expected something like MIDIs "24 ticks per quarter note" instead. And a format like bar.beat.tick. Maybe just because that is what I am used to.
It should be fine, but fractions (or both fractions and decimals) would be preferable in order to express triplets (3 over 2, effectively a duration of 0.3333...)
Count me in as another one with a longstanding mostly dream project aiming for human enjoyable notation grammar.
For me it was coming from tracker notation (buzz), where i was wildly underwhelmed by all that whitespace for timing (well, empty cells for timing) and the lack of parameterizable macros. A seriously underexplored field, perhaps because almost everybody who ever started got pulled in by the lure of textually defined synthesis.
I've been spending the last week casually looking at strudel.cc.
They have a notation that looks similar (basically a JavaScript port of the Haskell version).
I like this, but I'm curious why I would want to use this over strudel. Strudel blends the language with a js runtime and that's really powerful and fun.
"Transpose this MIDI file down a third" requires neither a specialized data format nor fancy prompt engineering. ChatGPT asked: "A) Major third up (+4 semitones) or B) Minor third up (+3 semitones)" then did it.
I still don't understand how this or the top level comment are related to the post.
I also don't get how you can claim we don't have to 'punch holes in cards to help the machine "think"', and also mention a MIDI file in your next comment. MIDI is much closer to punch cards than the proposed file format in the post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation https://abcnotation.com/
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