OPTML
A human-writable plaintext music notation language.
Table of Contents
Background
In some ways, this is my longest-running project ever. When I was a toddler I owned a tiny keyboard with numbers on the notes, and I used to write music ideas down as lists of numbers, rather than letter names or sheet music. Throughout my life I've always been faster and more comfortable reading and writing music as numbers, and over the years, as I continued to jot down ideas in this way every now and then, I slowly began to develop little conventions for how to notate things like note duration, chords, octave changes, and so on.
But it was only recently - almost 20 years into the "project" - that I started wondering if any similar system existed out there for transcribing music as plaintext. And, finding nothing out there, I thought it would be a perfect small project for me to take up.
In the very early stages of drafting the formal grammar for the language, I had the perfect testing ground: it was nearing the end of 2020, and I had to compile a list of themes from the year to riff on for my Improv Weekly finale. It was this language that I used to jot down the melodies for those themes, such that during the improv recording I could continually glance at my screen to remind myself what they all were.
The name "OPTML" stands for "Owen's Plain Text Music Language", and is pronounced like "optimal".
Contributing
N/A
License
MIT © Owen Maitzen