http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/Music

Folk Music

Online	Download	Released	Terms
Tunes	tunes.zip	2002-04-28	Free

About the Tunes

My tune collection has folk tunes in abc musical notation, sheet music (PDF), and MIDI for your listening pleasure. Most of these are Cambridge Folk Orchestra repertoire; others are personal favorites.

About the Arrangements

I am fond of Hungarian/Rumanian/Transylvanian folk tunes and their accompaniments (probably of less ancient origin). Chords for most of the tunes here are played by a virtual ensemble of bowed bass and contra, a flat-bridged viola body strung with three cello strings. I particularly like a style attributed to the Mezoseg region, which employs major chords almost exclusively.

About the MIDI renditions

The abc tunes are translated to MIDI files by the abcmidi program.

Abc2midi renders trills or turns (notated in abc by ~) with time proportional to the length of the following note. This does not sound good on many of these tunes, so all the ~ are filtered from abc2midi input in these renditions.

Although fiddle is typically the melodic lead for most of the tunes, the MIDI fiddle from my sound-card or the TiMidity++ program are painfully bad. The MIDI dulcimer (15) substitutes for fiddle in many of the tunes.

One drawback of dulcimer leads is that it cannot slur. But the transcriptions from S. Worland (an excellent fiddler CFO alumnus) have no slurs. Not playing violin, my attempts to add slurs have not been right for that instrument.

The Timidity trumpet has a slow attack which starts at the time specified; resulting in the horn playing behind the beat on fast melodies. Of course, human musicians play ahead of the beat to compensate. At present, I have given those parts to MIDI clarinet or accordian.

About the Sheet Music PDFs

The PDFs were generated from output from the ABC2PS program, version 1.3.3.

ABC2PS-1.3.3 does not print the "part" sequence contained in the first P: field of an abc file. Earlier versions of ABC2PS do print this field, but produce output which is not as compact; splitting some of the tunes onto two pages.

I am a guest and not a member of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. My actions and comments do not reflect in any way on MIT.
	agj @ alum.mit.edu	Go Figure!