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Anyone interested in learning how to play a particular piece of music can usually find help on doing that on the internet in a variety forms, such as videos or tutorials. A common way to convey the way to play a given song for instruments such guitar, bass, or drums is through the use of tablature or tab. These are often created in text as it is the easiest format to do that in. See two examples here:

Guitar tab

Drums tab

Look up some of the tabs for your favourite songs to get a feel for what these look like. You will see that they often have different styles which will be one of the challenges for our project.

Now, while text tabs are great in terms of helping you figure out a song, they are rather hard to read, cannot be easily adjusted, e.g to play the song in a different key, and cannot easily be turned into audio. There are many other formats out there that do not have these issues, but the fact is that the majority of the songs are more easily found in text tab form.

The music research community has developed a free format, called MusicXML, that can be used to precisely denote a piece of music. You can find everything about it here. This format is supported by many music apps, such as MuseScore, that can do all the things listed above, such as display the song in an easy to read fashion, transpose to another key, play the song etc.

However, no easy way to transform a text tab to a MusicXML one exists.

Our project will be to develop a software system that allows the user to input a text file containing the guitar, bass, or drums tablature for a song, and produces a MusicXML file that can be used for the purposes listed above.

Detailed requirements for our project will be developed during the term.

• Guitar tab explanation

• Guitar/bass notes on the fretboard in standard tuning. Lower string is at the bottom. The note on fret 5 is the same as the note at the next higher string at fret 0, i.e. open (except for the G string where that happens at fret 4). The lower note in a guitar is E2, i.e. E in octave 2, while on a bass it is E1.

• An example of a guitar text tab, and the corresponding MusicXML file. Please note that the MusicXML may have a lot more info, e.g. regarding layout. This is the bare minimum MusicXML file that represents the input.

• An example of a drum text tab, and the corresponding MusicXML file. Note that this example uses two voices (drums are often notated in two voices, one for the feet - bass drum and pedal hi-hat - and one for the hands). Once one voice has been specified in a measure, the <backup> tag is used to go back to the beginning and start notating the second voice. More on this here.

• You can preview any MusicXML file by dragging and dropping it onto this page.

• An example of a guitar text tab with a repeated section, and the corresponding MusicXML file. Note the number 4 on top of the last bar that designates the section is to be repeated 4 times. Your system must support repeats as shown in this example, as well as in the drum tab example posted since the beginning of the term (War Pigs by Black Sabbath).

• An example of a guitar text tab with a grace note, and the corresponding MusicXML file. Unfortunately, the online viewer posted above does not show grace notes in tablature, so you should use MuseScore to test grace note functionality.

1. The system must allow the user to improve the MusicXML output by editing the input text tab. For example, if the output for measure 42 is not what the user was hoping for when they load your output onto a viewer, your system must present this measure (or a range of measures) so that the user can edit accordingly. This includes metadata such as setting a different time signature for some of the measures.
2. The system must allow the user to save any edits made to the input text tab by the user, including any metadata edits, e.g. song title, time signature etc.
3. The system must support repeated measures. The drum example below contains many instances of repeats. See an example in the Useful Resources section below.
4. The system must also support grace notes. For guitar, any sequence of hammer-ons, pull-offs, or slides that is preceded by the character “g” should be treated as grace notes. For drums, flams (designated by the character “f” in the tab) must be implemented as grace notes. See an example in the Useful Resources section below.
5. The system must deal with errors in the input in a user-friendly way. Minor errors should be treated as warnings but should not stop the conversion process. Major errors in particular measures must be presented to the user to fix them.
6. The system must of course support all three instruments and as many as possible of the features shown in the two examples below.

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