ABCdb Project Description

ABCdb is a web-based tool for working with music notated in ABC format, providing database, deduplication, rendering, and analysis functions.

Overview

ABC is a text-based format for the notation of music. Since becoming popular in the 1990’s as a way for musicians to exchange music via mailing lists and Usenet, a huge number of musical pieces have been transcribed in this format. Estimates of the number of songs available on the web in ABC format today range between 100,000 and 1,000,000.

For example, the following music notation:

Standard Music Notation

can be written in ABC like this:

X:12
T:Cast A Bell
M:4/4
L:1/4
Q:1/2=100
O:England
K:G
F/G/Afe/d/|fe/d/eE|F/G/Afe/d/|d/G/F/E/FD:|

Because of this popularity and the nature of the format, working with collections of ABC-format songs presents a number of challenges:

  • While the text-based form is not difficult to decipher, most musicians want the music rendered into standard music notation, tablature, or audio forms.
  • With such a large body of music available, sophisticated search capabilities are needed.
  • Many of the thousands of ABC-format songs available deviate from the ABC standard, in ways ranging from subtle to major. Software for reading ABC must be both resilient to unintentional brokenness, and robust against malicious misuse.
  • Because musicians have passed ABC around so freely, often with changes, it is not uncommon to find many versions of the same song. It is very useful for ABC software to be able to eliminate duplicate copies of a song, as well as identify differences in song metadata, non-semantic notational differences, and differences in the actual notes of the songs.

The goal of ABCdb is to provide an easy means for users to store, search, retrieve, and render songs in ABC format. Currently, ABCdb provides:

  • A database for storing ABC-format music.
  • Individual user accounts.
  • Access controls, configurable for each user, to allow trusted users the full capabilities of the system, while avoiding problems that could be caused by accidental, intentional, or robotic misuse.
  • Music entry and update facilities, including basic text entry, file upload, and URL retrieval.
  • Robust handling of character encodings. Historically, ABC notation has been written using many different character encodings (ASCII, CP1252, ISO-8859-1, and UTF-8 are common), and ABC software has often not handled this well. ABCdb strives to properly convert everything to Unicode.
  • Deduplication capability, such that “musically indentical” instances of a song can be identified, while retaining the original versions for users who wish to explore their differences.
  • Basic search and retrieval facilities.
  • Rendering is done in-browser, using Paul Rosen’s abcjs.

Features planned for the next development milestone include:

  • Enhanced rendering facilities. Server-side rendering of the ABC can produce multiple output formats (PDF, SVG, PNG) in higher quality than the in-browser rendering. Other potential features include user configurability of the rendering (for example, for large-print output), rendering of both standard musical notation and tablature, and rendering to Standard MIDI Files or audio files.
  • Stronger deduplication facilities, as well as tools for indentifying “near matches”.
  • Better search facilities, including full-text keyword search, regular expression search, and searching by attributes such as meter, key, or melodic contour.
  • Preferences, settable on a per-user basis, for such things as rendering style and default search interface.
  • A better text editor for the manual ABC entry.
  • Web-scraping ability, for retrieval of ABC embedded in HTML.
  • An ‘de-mojibake-ize’ function, which, under a user’s guidance, will heuristically attempt to undo past misinterpretation of ABC character encoding. It is common to find ABC files wherein UTF-8 was once misinterpreted as ISO-8859-1 ‘Latin-1’.
  • Retrieval functions for selected subsets of the database, allowing the user to build custom tunebooks.

Motivation

There are a number of very good ABC-aggregating websites, which include many of the features of ABCdb. Examples include:

So why create another ABC tool if many others exist? My primary motivations for ABCdb are:

  • That it serve as a vehicle for extending my Python and Django skills, and as a demonstration or portfolio project showcasing those skills.
  • That it be usable as a locally-installable ABC database tool. Currently, the best ABC databases are all online tools. ABCdb is itself a web application, but it can be easily run using the Django development server and a SQLite database, with all required components packaged within a single virtualenv.
  • That it provide a test bed for research into ABC deduplication. Algorithmically determining the similarity of two ABC songs is a tricky problem, and recent advances in data mining and machine learning hold promise here.
  • I wanted a tool that I could be sure was handling character encodings as intelligently as possible. I’ve too often seen titles or lyrics savaged by software that does not handle this well.
  • As a musician, I am eager to have a good tool to manage my personal collection of some 30,000 ABC songs!

Songs, Instances, and Titles

Before exploring how ABCdb is used, it is helpful to explain the difference between ‘songs, ‘instances’, and ‘titles’. Consider two pieces of ABC notated-music, which are different, but which a musician would consider to express the same ‘song’. This is possible because many aspects of ABC don’t effect the music itself. For example, different titles could be given to the same song, or perhaps there are differences in spelling or whitespace. Information fields could be given in a different order, yet indicate the same result. (For further explanation of the possibilities, see Database Schema below).

We call these two different pieces of ABC music two ‘instances’ which express the same ‘song’.

To complicate matters, one instance of a song may have several titles, and any one title may be found in many different instances. So, ‘songs’, ‘instances’, and ‘titles’ are separate entities within the ABCdb database. Songs group like instances together, and titles are our most common means for finding the songs we’re looking for.

Relationship Between Song, Instance, and Title

In the diagram above, notice how each title links to the songs in whose instances the title was found. This is because we typically want to find all the instances of a song that were ever labelled with a particular title, even if a particular instance didn’t contain that title (it’s the same song, remember?) This may seem confusing at first, but with use it starts to feel natural.

Notice also that each instance links back to its first or primary title (the dashed lines in the diagram above.) When working with instances, this helps them appear less anonymous.

Installation

For information on installing ABCdb, see the README.

Usage

I will assume that the reader is comfortable using typical web applications, and not describe every step in detail.

The installation process described in the README creates an ‘admin’ user, and for installations with only one user, it is fine to just use this. If you wish to have more than one user, first log in as ‘admin’, then access the administration console by selecting the ‘admin’ link in the left-margin menu.

To load content into the database, select the ‘upload’ link. Here you may upload ABC-format files from your local machine, or if you are logged in as the administrative user, you may fetch them from a remote URL.

Any errors in the imported file will be shown in the upload progress screen. Deduplication is performed automatically as part of the upload process.

Songs may be searched for using the ‘search’ menu link, or browsed via the ‘titles’ and ‘collections’ links.

Architecture

ABCdb presents a somewhat simple exterior, yet there is much going on “under the hood”. The pieces of ABCdb that I have written are:

  • The ABCdb Django application, including all models, views, forms, and templates
  • Client-side JavaScript for generating graphs and charts using D3
  • An ABC parser (described in detail below)
  • A parse-tree visitor which reconstitutes parsed ABC in canonical form, for de-duplication purposes
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation

Off-the-shelf software that ABCdb uses:

ABCdb has been tested with both SQLite 3.13.0 and PostgreSQL 9.6.0 databases.

Documentation for ABCdb is produced in reStructuredText markup and rendered using Sphinx.

Database Schema

First, let us be more precise than the description of ‘song’, ‘instance’, and ‘title’ given above.

There is a one-to-many relationship between a song and its instances. Each unique instance of a song describes the same essential music due to a number of factors which do not affect the rendered output:

  • Semantically identical but textually different field values
  • Line re-ordering
  • Differences in encoding, e.g. ISO-8859-1 “Latin-1” vs. UTF-8, composed vs. decomposed Unicode, or canonically vs. compatibly normalized Unicode
  • Differences in orthography, e.g. characters with diacritics vs. their ASCII reductions, British vs. American spelling, or differences in capitalization
  • Differences in whitespace
  • Comments

Storing each instance allows the system to track every variation of a song; relating each instance to a canonical song facilitates deduplication.

In order to derive the ‘song’ from an instance, the ABC is parsed then reconstituted in a strict way, with all non-essential metadata stripped, lines canonically reordered, and fields normalized. This reconstituted ABC is then passed through a cryptographic hash function (e.g. MD5 or SHA-1), and the resulting digest is considered the canonical rendering of the song expressed by that instance.

Note that the ‘song’ is just this hash, and exists to group musically identical instances. Visual and audio renderings must be made from one of the associated instances.

The titles of an ABC song are of course found in its instances, yet in ABCdb titles are linked to songs in a many-to-many relationship. For the user, this results in more natural navigation–for example, if they are looking for all instances of a song called “Boil Them Cabbage Down”, they would not want to miss one just because it is called “Bile ‘Em Cabbace Down”. However, it is still convenient to associate a title with each instance, so each instance has a one-to-one relationship with its first or primary title.

ABC music is typically uploaded into ABCdb in files, which often contain multiple song instances. ABCdb tracks where each instance comes from by linking it to a ‘collection’. Note that a particular instance may be seen in multiple collections, and that a particular collection may contain multiple instances, so there is a many-to-many relationship between instances and collections.

Parser

The ABC parser is the heart of ABCdb’s deduplication ability. ABC notation grew rather organically, without any sort of formal standard for much of its early years, and many of the programs written for ABC added their own extensions to ABC. So parsing ABC is a bit tricky: the grammar is ambiguous, and many variations must be accounted for.

Here is fairly simple example of what the parser must parse:

X:22
T:Boil 'Em Cabbage Down
S:The Darlings on The Andy Griffith Show
M:2/4
L:1/4
K:D
"D"A/2A/4A/4 A/2A/2|"G"B/2B/4B/4 B/2B/2|"D"A/2A/4A/4 A/2F/2|"A7"E2|\
"D"A/2A/4A/4 A/2A/2|"G"B/2B/4B/4 B/2B/2|"A7"A/2c/4c/4 e/2c/2| [1"D"d2:|
 [2"D"d3/2|:A/2|"D"d/2d/4d/4 f/2A/2|d3/2A/2|"D"d/2d/4d/4 c/2B/2|"A7"A3/2A/2|\
"D"d/2d/4d/4 d/2d/2|"G"B/2B/4B/4 B/2B/2|"A7"A/2c/4c/4 e/2c/2|"D"d3/2:|

The first six lines are ‘information fields’, with the first letter of the line indicating what sort of information it provides about the tune. The last four lines (not counting the empty line which terminates the tune) are the ‘music code’, and specify the actual notes and timing of the tune.

This two-part character of ABC tunes led me to design a hybrid parser, with a hand-written top-down parser to classify the lines of an ABC file, and a recursive-descent (parsing expression grammar, or PEG) parser to parse the music code. Some of the reasons behind this design include:

  • Writing a parser using traditional tools that use production grammars (e.g. BNF) to specify the grammar is (as reported by others) quite a chore because of the ambiguity and informality of the ABC specification. In contrast, using recognition grammar-based tools (e.g. regular expressions or PEG parsers) tends to be much easier for ABC.
  • PEG parsers are easy to write!
  • Unfortunately, PEG parsers can be slow or use lots of memory, but because of the line-oriented nature of ABC, ABCdb can use a PEG parser to parse a line at a time (typically less than 100 bytes), with reasonable efficiency.
  • An information field may specify (change) the character encoding of the following lines. The current ABC specification tries to be clear that most of ABC is plain ASCII, except for “text strings” (such as tune titles), for which it is recommended that the encoding be specified. The top-half parser can respond to these character set changes, allowing it to pass only pre-decoded Unicode to the music code PEG parser.

Having the top-half parser handle the character encoding significantly simplifies the parser as a whole. Because a traditional PEG parser returns no results until its entire parse completes, the bottom-half PEG parser can’t respond to the encoding directives while parsing. (Some parsers, such as funcparselib, allow for executing certain actions at the time of a rule match, which together with a carefully constructed grammar, would allow a single parser to parse ABC while responding to character encoding changes. Arpeggio, the PEG parser used in ABCdb, does not (yet) have this ability.)

Licenses

ABCdb is written and copyrighted by Sean Bolton, and licensed under the MIT/Expat license:

Copyright © 2017 Sean Bolton.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Other software used in or by ABCdb is licensed under the following licenses:

  • Python: Python Software Foundation License
  • Django: 3-clause BSD license
  • SQLite3: public domain
  • PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL License (MIT-like)
  • pytz: MIT/Expat license
  • requests: Apache 2.0 license
  • Arpeggio PEG parser: MIT/Expat license
  • Graphviz python module: MIT/Expat license
  • Zurb Foundation: MIT/Expat license
  • abcjs: MIT/Expat license
  • D3: 3-clause BSD license
  • dagre: MIT/Expat license
  • dagre-d3v4: MIT/Expat license

See the file LICENSES for more information.