Name that tune

[simont]

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?

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

ABC format (http://abc.sourceforge.net/)?

[mair_in_grenderich]

do mobile phone "compose" functions have a standard format?

[shortcipher]

Not text-based, but... MIDI?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Don't the notes have names like C and D#? Can't you just write those down?

Or find a font with music notes in, or write a program which will draw them in ascii art?

Come to think of it, parhaps a gif of the music *is* the right solution -- it should compress fairly well, no?

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Bandwidth is cheap.

[gerald_duck]

Quite a few of us grok mup, which is a fairly legible textual format. Unfortunately, the software that converts it into postscript or MIDI, while being available as source code, isn't free of charge.

Personaly I have an even more serious soft spot for the music notation used by AMPLE, which isn't designed to be converted nicely into staff notation but is much easier on the (well, my) eye in textual form. But the software died with the BBC Micro platform; I keep feeling I should resurrect it.

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

What was the tune, just out of interest?

For linux users, there's...

[antifuchs.livejournal.com]

beep(1):

beep allows the user to control the pc-speaker with precision, allowing
different sounds to indicate different events. While it can be run
quite happily on the command line, it's intended place of residence is
within shell/perl scripts, notifying the user when something interest-
ing occurs. Of course, it has no notion of what's interesting, but
it's real good at that notifying part.

It runs from the command line, tone pitch and duration are controlled by its arguments.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Phone post?

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I remember a book, many years ago, which listed thousands of tunes in perhaps the simplest possible format:

* = first note
U = up from previous note
D = down from previous note
S = same as previous note

e.g.

*SUSUSDDSDSDSD = "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"

And then the keys were just sorted into alphabetical order.

I'm sure an online database could be used for this these days.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

You could write 16 stars (or however many beats the tune goes on for) on the first line, and then on the second line you could write the notes where they happen and a dash if the previous one was long and still continuing. This would however require either a piano or deborah_c.

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

There are such things as dictionaries of melodies, where all the tunes are transposed into C and just written down as 'C C D A B C' ekcetera.

There's probably an Intarwebs version of that now.