sheet-music-formats

Current Sheet Music Formats

There are various different ways to represent a piece of Sheet Music on the web.

This page serves to document the current list of sheet music formats and metadata as background research for the development of a sheet music microformat. -Barnaby Walters

Contributors

Templated off review-formats.

• Barnaby Walters

See Also

• sheet-music-examples

Widely Used Formats

Semantic Formats

ABC

A text based notation format originally designed for the notation of traditional music. It has become extremely widespread.

• http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1
  • More Reference: http://abcnotation.com/learn
• Data Stored
  • Actual Tune
  • ID (X:, only relevant when the tune is stored as part of a multi-tune book)
  • Title (T:)
  • Composer (C:)
  • Various Musical Attributes
    • Key
    • Meter
    • Default Note Length
    • Tempo
    • Parts
    • Rhythm (e.g. a tune in 3/4 can be played with various different rhythms)
  • Other Metadata
    • Book
    • Area of Origin
    • Notes
    • Transcriptor
    • Groups
    • History
• Deployed in the Wild
  • The Session — Huge repo of trad. Irish (+ all gaelic, some English) traditional music. Served as ABC and PNG
  • ABC Notation Website
    • List of other websites serving ABC tunes — Huge list of other abc sites
    • Web-wide abc tune search
    • WPC Gurdy Sheet Music Database — Barnaby Walters' hurdy gurdy sheet music DB.

MusicXML

An XML based notation format

• Spec: http://www.makemusic.com/musicxml/specification
  • More Reference: http://www.makemusic.com/musicxml
• Data Stored
• Deployed in the Wild
  • http://www.makemusic.com/musicxml/music — List of MusicXML repos on the web

Non-Semantic Formats

These are the formats that would benefit most from a microformat — giving them the same metadata that can be found in more semantic notation formats.

PDF

Tunes are commonly stored as PDFs.

• Examples in the Wild
  • Free Sheet Music.net — vast amounts of sheet music locked up in .pdf format
  • Forte Notation Free Sheet Music — A selection of sheet music for free download. You can select different pieces of the most common classical composers (Bach, Mozart, Schubert etc.)

Images

Tunes are commonly stored as images

• Examples in the wild
  • GIF on 8notes