this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Programming

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

ASCII tab

ASCII tab is a text file format used for writing guitar, bass guitar and drum tabulatures (a form of musical notation) that uses plain ASCII numbers, letters and symbols. It is the only widespread file format for representing tabulature, and is extensively used for disseminating tabulature via the Internet.

Tablature

Tablature (or tab for short) is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering or the location of the played notes rather than musical pitches.

Musical notation

Musical notation is any system used to visually represent music. Systems of notation generally represent the elements of a piece of music that are considered important for its performance in the context of a given musical tradition. The process of interpreting musical notation is often referred to as reading music.

If that information is incorrect, please contribute your expertise by editing the entries, because they lead me to believe calling ASCII tablatures notation is acceptable.

Even the article refers to them as notation.

Um, that’s just a screenshot of a ChatGPT session...! WTF? Obviously that’s not music notation. It’s ASCII tablature, a rather barebones way of notating music for guitar.

Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation.

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

...Yes, if you go back and read my fist post, you will find that I, too, refer to tabs as notation, and say: "it’s a customary txt-format notation". And if you go to the wiki article you linked and read the sentence after the one you pasted, you'll find it says :"ASCII tab is intended to be a human-readable format rather than machine-readable, and hence is not strictly defined.".

Wanna see another musical notation method that doesn't actually notate music?

+5 -6 -7 +7 -6 +5 -6 -7 +7 -6 
+5 -6 -7 +7 -7 -6 +7 -7 -6 +8 +8 +8 
+8 -8 +8 -9 -9 -9 +8 -8 -9 +8 
-8 +7 -7 +8 +7 -7 -6 

That's a harmonica tab - the number is the hole, the sign is inhale-exhale, but to actually play the song, you need to already know the tune to Bella Ciao.

[–] cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

Its not wrong to call tab notation, its just pretty basic and crude