I woke up this morning with a fragment of a tune running round my head, and no idea where it came from. I've just managed to identify it, thankfully, but it's been driving me mad in the two hours between then and now; and there's another tune fragment which I've been trying to identify for months if not years.

What I'd therefore like to do is to post the tune in my diary so that all my readers can see if they know it; but I don't know of any sensibly standard way to represent music in ASCII. I could sing it into a microphone and post a link to an MP3 (or, probably more usefully, synthesise it programmatically into an MP3, which wouldn't require recording hardware and also wouldn't involve my poor singing voice complicating the issue), or I could write it down in musical notation and post a link to a picture; but both of those solutions strike me as woefully wasteful of bandwidth given that the actual information content of the few bars I can remember ought in principle to be no more than a line or two of text. I could enter it into some sort of sequencer program and post the file saved from that, but that suffers from standardisation problems: it would limit my audience to people with the same sequencer program.

If only everybody had a Spectrum, I could post a sequence of BEEP commands which would play the tune, and this would actually be a more standard low-bandwidth approach than anything else I'd thought of. It even briefly occurred to me that you can get Spectrum emulators for most operating systems… But that's not a good idea either, because the trouble with Spectrum emulators is that you can't cut and paste into them, so it would be a matter of everyone manually typing in the BEEP commands I posted.

I must be missing something obvious. Is there no sensible way at all for me to post a few lines in a text-based forum and have the majority of readers be able to cut and paste that text into something which will convert it into a possibly recognisable tune?