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29-451: The quartet's sound is distinguished by its tenor's remarkable range (up to an E♭ 5 in chest voice ), though all the singers (save the bass) have a remarkable tenor range and often end songs with the baritone or lead singing a higher note than the tenor. The four members met each other when they attended Lee University together. They were all members of the Voices of Lee , sixteen-member

58-437: A – g , A – G , and z , to represent the corresponding notes and rests , along with other elements used to place added value on these – sharp, flat , raised or lowered octave , the note length , key , and ornamentation . This form of notation began from a combination of Helmholtz pitch notation and using ASCII characters to imitate standard musical notation (bar lines, tempo marks, etc.) that could facilitate

87-448: A cappella choir. The members of Four Voices have stated that their name is meant to be a reference to their former membership in the choir. This article about a barbershop quartet is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Scientific pitch notation#Table of note frequencies Scientific pitch notation ( SPN ), also known as American standard pitch notation ( ASPN ) and international pitch notation ( IPN ),

116-620: A few websites still serve ABC files as text/plain . In 1999, Chris Walshaw started work on a new version of the ABC specification to standardize the extensions that had been developed in various third-party tools. After much discussion on the ABC users mailing list, a draft standard (nominal version 1.7.6) was eventually produced in August ;2000, but was never officially released. Thereafter, Chris stepped away for several years from actively developing ABC. Guido Gonzato later compiled

145-465: A front-end for generating the TeX commands, which by 1993 evolved into the abc2mtex program. For more details see Chris Walshaw's short history of ABC and John Chambers's chronology of ABC notation and software. The most recent standard for ABC was released 21 December 2011. It is a textual description of ABC syntax, cleaning up many of the ambiguities of the 2.0 Draft Standard , which, in turn,

174-463: A new version of the specification and published a draft of version 2.0. This specification is now maintained by Irwin Oppenheim. Henrik Norbeck has also published a corresponding BNF specification. After a surge of renewed interest in clarifying some ambiguities in the 2.0 draft and suggestions for new features, serious discussion of a new (and official) standard resumed in 2011, culminating in

203-476: A note in terms of textual notation rather than frequency, while at the same time avoiding the transposition conventions that are used in writing the music for instruments such as the clarinet and guitar . It is also easily translated into staff notation, as needed. In describing musical pitches, nominally enharmonic spellings can give rise to anomalies where, for example in Pythagorean intonation C 4

232-399: A single staff line, the extensions by Walshaw and others has opened this up with an increased list of characters and headers in a syntax that can also support metadata for each tune. ABC notation being ASCII -based, any text editor can be used to create and edit the encoding. Even so, there are now many ABC notation software packages available that offer a wide variety of features, including

261-505: Is always C 4 , and C 4 is never any note but middle C. This notation system also avoids the "fussiness" of having to visually distinguish between four and five primes, as well as the typographic issues involved in producing acceptable subscripts or substitutes for them. C 7 is much easier to quickly distinguish visually from C 8 , than is, for example, c′′′′ from c′′′′′ , and the use of simple integers (e.g. C7 and C8) makes subscripts unnecessary altogether. Although pitch notation

290-567: Is a lower frequency than B 3 ; but such paradoxes usually do not arise in a scientific context. Scientific pitch notation avoids possible confusion between various derivatives of Helmholtz notation which use similar symbols to refer to different notes. For example, "C" in Helmholtz's original notation refers to the C two octaves below middle C, whereas "C" in ABC Notation refers to middle C itself. With scientific pitch notation, middle C

319-606: Is a method of specifying musical pitch by combining a musical note name (with accidental if needed) and a number identifying the pitch's octave . Although scientific pitch notation was originally designed as a companion to scientific pitch (see below), the two are not synonymous. Scientific pitch is a pitch standard —a system that defines the specific frequencies of particular pitches (see below). Scientific pitch notation concerns only how pitch names are notated, that is, how they are designated in printed and written text, and does not inherently specify actual frequencies. Thus,

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348-528: Is an absolute pitch standard , first proposed in 1713 by French physicist Joseph Sauveur . It was defined so that all Cs are integer powers of 2, with middle C (C 4 ) at 256  hertz . As already noted, it is not dependent upon, nor a part of scientific pitch notation described here. To avoid the confusion in names, scientific pitch is sometimes also called "Verdi tuning" or "philosophical pitch". The current international pitch standard, using A 4 as exactly 440  Hz , had been informally adopted by

377-440: Is intended to describe sounds audibly perceptible as pitches, it can also be used to specify the frequency of non-pitch phenomena. Notes below E 0 or higher than E 10 are outside most humans' hearing range , although notes slightly outside the hearing range on the low end may still be indirectly perceptible as pitches due to their overtones falling within the hearing range. For an example of truly inaudible frequencies, when

406-475: Is traditionally called the sub-contra octave , and the tone marked C 0 in SPN is written as ,,C or C,, or CCC in traditional systems, such as Helmholtz notation . Octave 0 of SPN marks the low end of what humans can actually perceive, with the average person being able to hear frequencies no lower than 20 Hz as pitches. The octave number increases by 1 upon an ascension from B to C. Thus, A 0 refers to

435-581: Is understandably easier to simply refer to notes by their closest modern equivalent, as opposed to specifying the difference using cents every time. The table below gives notation for pitches based on standard piano key frequencies : standard concert pitch and twelve-tone equal temperament . When a piano is tuned to just intonation , C 4 refers to the same key on the keyboard, but a slightly different frequency. Notes not produced by any piano are highlighted in medium gray, and those produced only by an extended 108-key piano, light gray. Mathematically, given

464-561: The Acoustical Society of America in 1939, and adopted by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955. C 0 , which was exactly 16 Hz under the scientific pitch standard, is now 16.35160 Hz under the current international standard system. ABC Notation ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with

493-495: The Chandra X-ray Observatory observed the waves of pressure fronts propagating away from a black hole, their one oscillation every 10 million years was described by NASA as corresponding to the B ♭ fifty-seven octaves below middle C (B −53 or 3.235  fHz ). The notation is sometimes used in the context of meantone temperament , and does not always assume equal temperament nor

522-531: The ABC conversion tools. For example, the Score extension (using LilyPond 's abc2ly ) code for the MediaWiki software renders this as: While abcm2ps software produces output that looks like: [REDACTED] More examples can be found on Chris Walshaw's ABC examples page, extensively displaying most ABC basic features, except rests, which would be denoted with z . Recently, ABC has been implemented as

551-546: The ability to read and process ABC notation into MIDI files and as standard "dotted" notation. Such software is readily available for most computer systems, including Microsoft Windows , Unix / Linux , Macintosh , Palm OS , and web-based. Later third-party software packages have provided direct output, bypassing the TeX typesetter, and have extended the syntax to support lyrics aligned with notes, multi-voice and multi-staff notation, tablature , and MIDI . ABC notation

580-473: The first A above C 0 and middle C (the one-line octave 's C or simply c′ ) is denoted as C 4 in SPN. For example, C 4 is one note above B 3 , and A 5 is one note above G 5 . The octave number is tied to the alphabetic character used to describe the pitch, with the division between note letters ‘B’ and ‘C’, thus: Scientific pitch notation is often used to specify the range of an instrument. It provides an unambiguous means of identifying

609-439: The music industry as far back as 1926, and A440 became the official international pitch standard in 1955. SPN is routinely used to designate pitch in this system. A 4 may be tuned to other frequencies under different tuning standards, and SPN octave designations still apply (ISO 16). With changes in concert pitch and the widespread adoption of A440 as a musical standard, new scientific frequency tables were published by

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638-584: The number n of semitones above middle C, the fundamental frequency in hertz is given by 440 ⋅ 2 ( n − 9 ) / 12 {\displaystyle 440\cdot 2^{(n-9)/12}} (see twelfth root of two ). Given the MIDI NoteOn number m , the frequency of the note is normally 440 ⋅ 2 ( m − 69 ) / 12 {\displaystyle 440\cdot 2^{(m-69)/12}} Hz, using standard tuning. Scientific pitch

667-456: The release of ABC 2.1 as a new standard in late December 2011. Chris Walshaw has become involved again and is coordinating the effort to further improve and clarify the language, with plans for topics to be addressed in future versions to be known as ABC 2.2 and ABC 2.3 . The following is an example of the use of ABC notation in MediaWiki . Lines in the first part of

696-565: The sharing of music online, and also added a new and simple language for software developers, not unlike other notations designed for ease, such as tablature and solfège . The earlier ABC notation was built on, standardized, and changed by Chris Walshaw to better fit the keyboard and an ASCII character set, with the help and input of others. Originally designed to encode folk and traditional Western European tunes ( e.g. , from England, Ireland, and Scotland) which are typically single-voice melodies that can be written in standard notation on

725-490: The standard concert A 4 of 440  Hz ; this is particularly the case in connection with earlier music. The standard proposed to the Acoustical Society of America explicitly states a logarithmic scale for frequency, which excludes meantone temperament, and the base frequency it uses gives A 4 a frequency of exactly 440 Hz. However, when dealing with earlier music that did not use equal temperament, it

754-435: The tune notation, beginning with a letter followed by a colon, indicate various aspects of the tune such as the index, when there is more than one tune in a file ( X: ), the title ( T: ), the time signature ( M: ), the default note length ( L: ), the type of tune ( R: ) and the key ( K: ). Lines following the key designation represent the tune. This example can be translated into traditional music notation using one of

783-425: The use of scientific pitch notation to distinguish octaves does not depend on the pitch standard used. The notation makes use of the traditional tone names (A to G) which are followed by numbers showing which octave they are part of. For standard A440 pitch equal temperament , the system begins at a frequency of 16.35160 Hz , which is assigned the value C 0 . The octave 0 of the scientific pitch notation

812-534: Was grown from the 1996 User Guide of version 1.6 of Chris Walshaw's original "abc2mtex" . program. In 1997, Henrik Norbeck published a Backus–Naur form (BNF). In 1997, Steve Allen registered the text/vnd.abc MIME media type with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), but registration as a top level MIME type would require a formal Request for Comments (RFC). In 2006 Phil Taylor reported that quite

841-480: Was in widespread use in the teaching of Irish traditional music in the late 1970s and most probably much earlier than that. In the 1980s Chris Walshaw began writing out fragments of folk / traditional tunes using letters to represent the notes before he learned standard Western music notation. Later he began using MusicTeX to notate French bagpipe music. To reduce the tedium of writing the MusicTeX code, he wrote

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