GABC Transcription and Psalm Tone Tool FAQ

What is this for?

This is three separate tools to aid in the transcription of chant into GABC notation, and a fourth which only deals with chants that have already been transcribed. The first is called the "GABC Transcription Tool" and the second is called the "Psalm Tone Tool" and they will be dealt with separately below. The others are the "Readings Tool" and the "Propers Tool".

Who wrote it, and why?

My name is Benjamin Bloomfield, and the schola that I sing with in Cincinnati, Ohio began chanting Vespers every Sunday in Lent of 2010, but not all of us have a Liber Usualis to sing from, so we were making copies of the chant and pointed psalms from the Liber Usualis every week. I thought about retypesetting things with Gregorio and TeX, but one of the problems was that formatting the text of the psalms with certain syllables in bold and italic is both tedious and error-prone when done by hand. While chanting Vespers one Sunday in January 2011, I realized that it would be relatively simple to write a computer program to automatically break apart a Latin text into syllables, and (as long as the accents are already marked) apply a psalm tone to it or mark certain syllables as bold or italic. In the process of writing this Psalm Tone Tool, it became obvious that it would also be advantageous to split apart Latin into its syllables simply to prevent having to type so many parentheses, and thus the GABC Transcription Tool was born. I put together the Readings Tool after my dad (a permanent deacon) had asked about chanting a specific Gospel in English. The Propers Tool, I wrote more recently (in 2013) at the suggestion of one of my brothers.

What about the graphical representation of the chant?

I had begun a project in May 2010, thinking it would be simple to render GABC into a webpage, but abandoned it later in the year, half-finished. When I wrote these tools, it was a natural fit to use what I already had half-working in order to allow for a graphical preview of the chant, and actually using this code for something provided additional inspiration for getting it to work better, because it is annoying whenever it displays something incorrectly, and thus I have improved much in the rendering of the chant preview since writing the transcription tool. Some of the tools use the Exsurge library by Father Matthew Spencer.

Can I have a look at the source code?

Sure. It is hosted at Github, here.

Have any of these questions really been frequently asked?

One or two of them may have been asked by a real person, but certainly not frequently.

Is there any way of running this while not connected to the Internet?

Yes, as long as you use Chrome on the desktop, or an Android phone or iPhone/iPad. You can get the Chrome Web App version here and it will work whether you are connected to the Internet or not, and there is an Android App available here. The iPhone/iPad version is available here.

Would you like any of my money as a way of thanking you for putting these tools together?

Not really, but if you insist, you can send me a donation.

What about for the iPhone version? Doesn't Apple charge you to join their developer program?

Yes, they charge $99+tax every year for anyone to be in their developer program, which is required to list apps in their App Store. If you'd like to contribute to keeping the iPhone version available, please click here, and thank you for your support.

GABC Transcription Tool

What is the GABC Transcription Tool?

It is a tool to allow you to enter GABC notation without having to mark the syllable breaks, and without having to use so many parentheses. It is also useful for transcribing chants that have repetitive melodies over different texts, such as hymns.

What does it do exactly?

It does several different things. Its original use was simply to take a Latin text and intersperse it with parenthetic GABC notation after each syllable. That is, it takes the two separate texts, "c e g g" and "Adoro te", and produces: "A(c)do(e)ro(g) te(g)" thus saving the typing of many parentheses.

For hymns, it is useful to repeat the melody over each verse. It is also useful to have sections of melody and text, each of which repeats the melody for that section over all the text, for example with a hymn that has several verses followed by an "amen" of an entirely different melody. This can be done by separating the sections with a line that consists entirely of two dashes: "--", or

1. first verse text... 2. second verse text -- Amen.

for the text and

GABC for verses... -- GABC for Amen

for the GABC.

It will not repeat the GABC for the last section, so if you have only one section and want it to repeat over all the text, you will have to enter the last line as --

Will it work in reverse?

Yes, to some extent, although it isn't always working quite right at the moment. If you click 'Show integrated GABC' and type into the single textbox that shows up, it will separate the text from the GABC notation if you type or paste regular GABC with the text and GABC interleaved with parentheses, and display it as chant below.

How can elisions be marked in the text?

If you need to mark an elision in the text of the hymn, you can enclose the elided part of the syllable in parentheses. You can change the behavior of elisions by checking or unchecking the "Use puncta for elisions" checkbox. If this checkbox is checked, the elided syllable will get a punctum associated with it. If it is unchecked, the syllable will simply be skipped when assigning GABC to each syllable.

What can I do if it doesn't break up my word into syllables properly?

Right now, there is an inconsistency in the way this is handled depending on whether English is checked. If English is checked, then you can separate syllables with an equals sign (=), but if you use one equals sign in a word, you must you it between every syllable, as it won't look that word up in the dictionary at all. If English is not checked, you may use a hyphen (-) and if you use one hyphen, you must use it on all syllables to the left as well. If you want to mark a word as a monosyllable, you may end the word with a hyphen (e.g., quo-)

Are there any other features I should know about?

There is at least one feature that may be classified as such. When typing into the text field, you may enter accented vowels by typing an apostrophe immediately after a vowel (e.g., e' will be converted to é) This also works with quotation marks and diphthong ligatures, such that e" will be converted to ë and ae and oe will be converted to æ and œ. These conversions will not be made when English is checked above the textbox, and they can be undone by pressing Backspace. (e.g., pressing Backspace while the text cursor is immediately to the right of æ will change the æ to ae, but will not move the cursor.)

Apropos of the aforementioned "English" checkbox, what is it, and what does it do?

It signifies whether the text is English, so that the syllabification can be done differently. English syllabification is done by checking each word against a dictionary (actually by feeding them into the lyric hyphenator at this site) and it only updates the local dictionary every 5 seconds, so you will sometimes have to wait for it to properly syllabify the text.

Is there any way to hear what the chant might sound like?

Oh, yes. If you click on the large initial or the first note of the chant, it will give you some options to set the starting pitch and play the chant. If you click on a punctum, it will turn blue and give you some options. Use the controls that display at the bottom of the screen to pause, step through, change the tempo, or stop the chant.

Is there anything else it does that you still forgot to mention?

Yes, I nearly forgot. If you click on lyrics or notes within the chant while holding down a modifier key (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, etc.), it will highlight the GABC code that maps to it. There is also a link to generate a PDF of the chant using the web front-end to Gregorio here. This link is in the upper right corner and is labeled, "(PDF)". The link next to it (Further PDF Options) links to the same site, but gives you an opportunity to change settings, such as the font used, before generating the PDF.

Is there a way to move whole groups of notes up or down?

Yes. You can do this by holding down <Alt> while pressing up or down. Also, this will only happen if the GABC or Integrated GABC text field is active at the time. If you select part of the GABC, only that part will be moved.

What about the 'Download Integrated GABC' link?

Yes, I should have mentioned that. You can click that to download the GABC file, which will be a text file containing the text in the Integrated GABC text box, which will show up if you click the "Show integrated GABC" link at the top. From Chrome, you can drag this link onto an explorer window, and it will name the .gabc file with the value of the name field in the header, if you have edited the GABC header.

FAQ (Frequently Anticipated Questions)

GABC Transcription Tool

Psalm Tone Tool

Readings Tool

Propers Tool