Abcl: Abc music notation with rich chord support

Abstract

It is well known the relevance of accompany chords but there is a lack of tools capable of automatically generating sound from them. In this paper we describe a domain specific language (Abcl) aimed to be a prototyping environment for new experimental music operators. Currently Abcl: (1) adds support for accompany chords (chordmode, instruments, chord-lines); (2) adds clearer support for percussion (drums, drum-machine) (3) adds a support for variables and functions. Abcl tool is a syntactic-preprocessor that produces Abc. The DSLToolkit, used to create Abcl, is also briefly presented and discussed in the paper.