[ddots-l] Guitar tablature
- From: Rui Vilarinho <ruialby@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2012 16:40:55 +0000
Hi List,
Anyone is using this Lunar Tabs? I cant find the executable!
Information: The purpose of Lunar Tabs is to give a person who is blind the
ability to more easily access electronic guitar tablature (tabs) by converting
electronic tabs to a format that a screen reader can process.
Guitar Tablature (tabs) is a popular notation that musicians use to convey
musical ideas. In the information age, more and more musicians are harnessing
the power of electronic guitar tabs. Originally, guitar tablature was an
ASCII-format. However, different musicians would use different character sets
to represent different musical elements (such as trills, hammer-offs, dynamics,
etc) and there was never any standardization of the ASCII-format.
Companies that build music software tried to remedy this difficulty by
introducing a couple standard formats. The two prevailing standards are guitar
pro (.gp5) and power tab (.ptb). Several commercial and open source editors
exist that allow one to compose/read tablature and save in one or both of these
formats. Sites such as Ultimate Guitar (http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/) and
911Tabs (http://www.911tabs.com/) house giant tab libraries where anybody can
freely download tabs, which exist for virtually every popular song. Hobbyist
and professional musicians contribute tabs to these databases daily.
The problem that Lunar Tabs tries to address is that none of the tab readers
are built with accessibility in mind. None of the existing readers are
screen-reader friendly so a person who is blind would have difficulty using
them.
To solve this problem, Lunar Tabs takes as input an electronic guitar tab in
guitar pro or power tab format and generates a sequence of text instructions
for playing a particular piece. For example, if an "A" appears on the guitar
tab, Lunar Tabs might output the instructions {"Play third string second fret,
quarter note"}. These instructions could then be accessed by a screen reader. A
person who is blind, armed with Lunar Tabs, would have the ability to learn any
song they wanted by harnessing the giant tab libraries online.
http://code.google.com/p/lunartabspro/
guitar players? how do you deal with tablature?
Writin and reading?!
regards,
Rui Vilarinho
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