Music – Accessories – Teaching devices
Reexamination Certificate
1998-12-11
2001-03-13
Nappi, Robert E. (Department: 2837)
Music
Accessories
Teaching devices
C084S454000, C084S47000P, C084S475000, C084S483200
Reexamination Certificate
active
06201174
ABSTRACT:
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to digital music, and in particular, to an editing system that provides enhanced tablature representations for digital musical scores.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Recorded music has conventionally existed in human-readable and machine-readable forms. Human-readable music typically comprises a text, known as sheet music, containing written symbols that represent the sounds in a musical composition. Machine-readable music can be represented in many different formats based on the machine that is to play the music. For example, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (“MIDI”) standard specifies that aspects of music, such as pitch and volume, are encoded in 8-bit bytes of digital information.
Musicians have developed various musical notation systems for human-readable sheet music over the course of many centuries. The standard staff notation, based upon a staff (or stave) of five lines, represents the predominate musical notation system in Western music. Each line, and each space between the lines, comprises a different pitch. Notes representing a tone of a given pitch may be placed on a line or in a space. A clef, positioned at the beginning of every staff, indicates the pitch assigned to one of the lines, e.g., a treble clef and a base clef.
A musical notation system needs to suit the music it represents. Accordingly, musicians have developed other human-readable notational systems for particular types of music and particular instruments. The tablature staff, or “tab,” comprises a human-readable notational system for representing music played on stringed instruments, such as a guitar or a bass. Rather than utilizing the symbols found in the conventional staff notation, tablature uses ordinary text characters and numbers to represent a musical score. Tablature tells the musician what notes to play by indicating which string should be struck and the effective length of the string. The effective length of the string is typically changed by placing a finger on the string so that vibration of the struck string stops at the placement of the finger. Some stringed instruments have frets to assist in the changing of the effective length of the string. A fret represents one of series of ridges fixed across a stringed instrument's fingerboard, such as the 24 frets commonly affixed on the neck of a guitar. In the following, the term “fretting” refers to the changing of the effective length of a string, whether the instrument has actual frets (e.g., a guitar) or not (e.g. a bass). Tablature may also tell the musician where hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, slides, harmonics, and vibrato occur in a musical score. Tablature may even indicate an appropriate tuning for a musical score.
Tablature provides a music notation system that is rather simple for a musician to read because tablature corresponds to the six strings stretched across a guitar's long fretted neck. As shown in
FIG. 1A
, a musician conventionally tunes strings
120
-
125
of a guitar
100
as E, A, D, G, B, and E. The musician conventionally tunes the strings
120
-
125
upward from E, one line below the base clef of the conventional staff notation, to another E, the first line of the treble clef in the conventional staff notation. A musician plays a guitar by plucking the strings
120
-
125
with the fingers of the right hand while those of the left hand close various frets
101
-
109
to produce different tones and chords.
Tablature, such as that shown in
FIG. 1B
, utilizes lines
150
-
155
corresponding to the strings of a stringed instrument, e.g., the strings
120
-
125
of the guitar
100
. The line
150
represents the highest pitch string (conventionally tuned to E), and the line
155
represents the lowest pitch string (conventionally tuned to a lower E). As shown in
FIG. 1B
, the tuning (E, A, D, G, B, E) for the lines
150
-
155
conventionally appears on the left side of the tablature notation.
Musical notes
160
-
165
written as numbers on the lines
150
-
155
tell the musician where to fret a string with the left hand. In tablature, a zero, such as a zero
160
, indicates that a string should be played “open” and not fretted. As in the conventional staff notation, the musician reads a tablature notation from left to right to reveal an order in which the notes
160
-
165
should be played. The illustrated tablature notation of
FIG. 1B
indicates the sequence of the notes
160
-
165
to be played on the A string by moving up one fret at a time, e.g., playing first the open A string
124
of the guitar
100
, then playing the A string
124
at the fret
101
, followed by playing the A string
124
at the fret
102
, and concluding by playing the A string
124
at the fret
105
.
FIG. 1B
illustrates a tablature notation in which the musician plays the notes
160
-
165
one at a time. Of course, a musician may play multiple notes together on a stringed instrument, and
FIG. 2
illustrates a tablature notation that tells the musician when to play notes together in a musical score. Tablature notation indicates when the musician should play two or more notes together by writing one note on top of another, e.g., a note
202
over a note
201
. The tablature notation shown in
FIG. 2
represents a G-bar chord
207
by indicating that the musician should play the third fret of the E string
155
(the note
201
) together with the fifth fret of the A string
154
(the note
202
), the fifth fret of the D string
153
(a note
203
), the fourth fret of the G string
152
(a note
204
), the third fret of the B string
151
(a note
205
), and the third fret of the E string
150
(a note
206
). Thus, this tablature notation directs the musician to play the notes
201
-
206
together as the G-bar chord
207
.
FIG. 3
shows the G-bar chord
207
of
FIG. 2
written in a slightly different manner. The tablature notation showed in
FIG. 3
indicates that the musician should strum the G-bar chord
207
starting at the E string
155
so that each string is hit slightly later than its preceding string, although all the notes
201
-
206
will ring together. Writing the notes
201
-
206
shown in
FIG. 3
closer together signals the musician that the strings
150
-
155
should be strummed quickly while writing the notes
201
-
206
farther apart signals the musician to strum the strings
150
-
155
more slowly.
Tablature provides the musician with an indication of a musical score's rhythm, i.e., tablature tells the musician which notes are long and which are short. Nevertheless, tablature does not provide a musician with as precise an indication of a musical note's length as the notes provided by the conventional staff notation. Tablature also does not tell the musician which fingers should be used to fret which notes. In addition, tablature also does not normally provide information regarding picking and strumming, leaving these choices to the musician.
As illustrated by
FIG. 4
, tablature notation provides a musician with information regarding the relative lengths of the notes in a musical score only. Accordingly, a musician must often listen to a song to pick up its rhythm. Nevertheless, tablature provides the musician with some indications of timing. As a general rule, the spacing of notes in tablature tells the musician which notes are the long ones and which notes are the fast ones. For example, when a musician compares notes
401
and
402
shown in
FIG. 4
with notes
403
and
404
, the musician can determine a relative length for these notes, e.g., the note
401
is longer than the note
403
.
Tablature notation also includes extra letters or symbols written between notes that indicate how the musician should play the notes. Table 1 provides some of the more commonly encountered symbols.
TABLE 1
Symbol
Meaning
H
Hammer-On
P
Pull-Off
B
Bend String Up
R
Release Bend
/
Slide Up
\
Slide Down
V
Vibrato
T
Write Hand Tap
X
Play note with heavy damping
No single tablature convention exists, with many tablature variations diverging considerably. Tablature ne
Fletcher Marlon
Nappi Robert E.
Perkins Coie LLP
Sunhawk.com Corporation
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