ABC notation
file format family for music notation
ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with 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 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 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 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.
History
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “ABC notation” is file format family for music notation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through notation, file and format, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q287067. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “ABC notation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.