Does anyone know of anything that will take ABC and write out the doh-re-me ? I want to try singing along to a MIDI file while looking at the dots. (yes I know writing it out by hand might be a good learning exercise but its boring)
My first thoughts are that the ABC file would not need to be parsed in detail, it’s not much more than text substitution, but before I have a go I thought I would take the grown-up approach and ask if anyone had already done it.
Solfege in ITM is a more fraught matter than it seems. The tunes are frequently neither major nor minor but modal, so the real tonic (ie, doh) isn’t where it seems.
The music notation software “Harmony” can import abc tunes and display solfa under the staff notation. You can download a free trial version (with 30 day limit) here: http://www.greenhedges.com/demo.htm
s1m0n. The way that Breathnach described it (http://www.mcgee-flutes.com/CeolRince1.htm) seems to fit the way my mind works. That is, taking Do as the start of the diatonic scale in use even if the ‘home note’ is, say, Re.
I may be missing something here, but if a parser gets the number of sharps or flats in the key signature right then the Do of the diatonic major scale ‘in use’ is unambiguous*. After that it doesn’t bother me. I will compare my (no doubt faulty) ‘instinct’ about how a chunk of melody does or doesn’t find a way to a ‘home’ somewhere with what Breathnac and the other experts say.
*if it’s some wierd (e.g. sharps and flats) key signature then I will let that tune pass as being ‘unsuitable for the novice’.
I’ve dropped a note on the abcusers list and will report the results here. I was sure I’d seen a solution using abcm2ps, but I can find it anywhere in my stuff or on the web.
Should be fairly easy to, say, write a Perl routine to add w: lyrics lines of solfège syllables, one per note, either fixed or movable Do. Not that I have time to do that right at the moment.
It looks like Harmony will do the job. There are two options “Tonic Solfa”, which puts Do on the home note of the mode given in the K: field (so that K: Ador gives Do for A) or “Tonic Solfa (related Major)” which puts Do on the root of the major scale (so K: Ador gives Do for G).
Have not tried singing along yet but a quick play through suggests it will be a way of programming my brain as to where each note is on the scale in use. This exercise was partially triggered by the transposition thread currently running on the whistle forum.