From: putz@parc.xerox.com (Steve Putz)
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk,alt.guitar.tab
Subject: The Digital Tradition song database
Keywords: Digital Tradition folk music database
Date: 12 Sep 92 04:22:02 GMT
Reply-To: putz@parc.xerox.com (Steve Putz)
Organization: Xerox PARC

Last month I saw the following posted on rec.folk.music:

>> If anybody wants it, THE DIGITAL TRADITION is distributing a database
>> with the words to 3200 plus songs (and the music to 1400 of them) FREE!
>> If you want a copy, send disks (3x1.2 MB or 2x1.4 MB) and a 
>> self-addressed stamped mailer to:
>> THE DIGITAL TRADITION
>> Dick Greenhaus
>> 28 Powell Street
>> Greenwich, CT 06831
>> All software required is included.
>> 
>> Dick%admiral.uucp@YALE.edu (Dick Greenhaus)

I sent away and recently received a copy.  It consists of a PC database
program for searching and displaying song lyrics (most without chords).
There is also a program for playing some of the song melodies over the
PC speaker.

I do not have nor normally use a PC, so I extracted the songs into a 4MB
plain text file that I can search and manipulate using Unix utilities
(like grep and awk).

The info that came with the database is included below.  Is there interest
in having this available on an FTP server somewhere?  (egads, then there
would be *three* incompatible song archives.)

Also, does anyone know anything about the SongWrite music file format?
(sample included below).  It would be cool if someone could come up with
a program to play these on a Sun SPARCstation.

Steve Putz <putz@parc.xerox.com>
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto, California

-----------------------------------------------------------------
               about THE DIGITAL TRADITION

In the beginning....

     Back in the Spring of 1988, two folk music enthusiasts, 
each clutching a weighty notebook, met and compared (what else?) 
notes. Since the two, Dennis Cook and Susan Friedman, were both 
using home computers as word processors to produce new notebook 
pages, a decision to pool resources was an obvious one. The 
Digital Tradition was born. 

     It soon became apparent that word processor files had severe 
limitations as a storage format for the words to a large number 
of songs --- even with the 400 or so songs that we started out 
with, the collection was space-consuming. Worse, it was almost 
impossible to find what you were looking for. Duplications kept 
popping up, and cataloging was a nightmare.

     After a good deal of experimentation and researching ---  we 
first tried archiving the songs to save space, but this didn't 
help us with any of the other problems --- we encountered a very 
fast, very powerful full-text search program called askSam that 
was the answer to our prayers. To make things even better, 
askSam's publisher (askSam Systems, Perry Florida) was interested 
in what we were doing, and graciously allowed us to distribute a 
read-only sub-set of their program at no charge. As a result, 
it's a simple matter to sift through our ever-growing collection 
(3200+ songs as of August 1992) and extract any song with, say, 
the name Mary in it. Or all (or any) of the more than 195 Child 
ballads we have. Or songs by your favorite composer. Or, for that 
matter, any bawdy Scots parodies dealing with computers --- yes, 
we even have one of those. 

     The next major step was to find a way to share the melodies 
of the songs. We found an effective answer in a music-processing 
program called SongWright (Songwright, Leesburg VA). This program 
allowed us to enter songs in a reasonably compact format (so that 
they don't occupy an unreasonably large number of disks), and, 
among other things, allows them to be played on the computer's 
built-in beeper. The good folks at SongWright have also been 
gracious enough to allow us to distribute the play-only version 
of their program at no charge. Frankly, we're overwhelmed by the 
helpful attitudes of the people at both askSam and SongWright --- 
we hope that you'll be sufficiently impressed by what you see of 
their fine products to purchase your own copies of the complete 
systems. If you do buy SongWright, for example, you'll be able to 
print out the tunes to 1400 of the songs --- in any key, yet ---
as well as edit them and play them through a MIDI interface on a 
wide variety of electronic instruments. We've included a printout 
of a tune to show you what you're missing.


Many, many thanks to...
     
     All the people who have contributed songs to the Digital 
Tradition. These include Dennis Cook, Susan Friedman, Dick 
Greenhaus, Mark Cohen, Bob Reed, Bob Pfeffer, Harry Berkowitz, 
Dick Park, Diane Tankel, Alan Booth, Edith Lux, Peter Sailer, 
Bruce Gewirtz, Jonathon Young, Steve Shapiro, Spike Werner, Steve 
Gilette, Dave Green and another dozen or so whose names just don't 
come to mind at this moment. 
        Thanks too to Dennis Cook, Dick Greenhaus, Bob Lux, Hymie 
Snyder and those others who have provided invaluable programming 
assistance. 
 
     Special thanks to the Philadelphia Folksong Society, whose 
generous grant allowed us to upgrade our computer equipment to 
keep pace with the ever-increasing demands made by the ever-
increasing size of the ever-increasing Digital Tradition.
   
And the future...

     We're not sure exactly where the Digital Tradition will wind 
up, except that it will always represent the best way we can come 
up with to disseminate folk songs. And it will also be supplied 
at no charge to anyone who wants it. 

     We're currently adding about 150 songs (mostly with tunes) 
every three months. We're investigating the possibilities of 
establishing an interactive bulletin board, so we can deal with 
people who call up and make requests like "what do you have in 
the way of songs about evolution?" without completely running out 
of time. We're looking at schemes to make searches faster and more 
flexible. We're thinking of ways to catalog families of tunes (a 
huge task). We're open to suggestions.


TECHNICAL INFORMATION

     The Digital Tradition is supplied on floppy disks, in 
various formats, to be read into a hard disk. No knowledge of 
programming is required --- it may even be a hindrance. 

     The Digital Tradition is BIG; it requires about 5 MB of 
disk space to run, and about 7-8 MB free to install it. It's 
supplied as several self-extracting archived files (using PKZIP), 
and is supplied with an install program called GO that unarchives 
them, and then erases the intermediate files as they're no longer 
required. All programs required to work with the Digital 
Tradition are supplied.

     The tunes are archived into a single file called TUNE.ARC; 
the Digital Tradition software uses PKXARC to extract the 
particular tune you want to hear, plays it and then erases it to 
save space. PKARC, while not as space-efficient as PKZIP, is 
considerably faster, and was used to reduce processing time. If 
you have SongWright and wish to extract a tune from the archived 
file, just type: <PKXARC -x TUNE title>, where title is the 
tune's filename. You can see a list of available tune filenames 
by typing <PKXARC -v TUNE>.

     The words are in a single askSam file, which is read through 
RT, a sub-set of askSam. There are several choices on the menu; 
the first two (LIST and CONTEXT) use full-text searching. You can 
search for single words. If you specify two or more words, the 
program assumes that you wish to see songs with all of those 
words, in any order anywhere within the text. If you want a 
particular phrase, enclose it in square brackets. If you wish to 
find songs with either of two words, separate them in the request 
with {OR}.

     There's an imperfect attempt on our part to list categories 
that a song may fit into: these are words preceded by a @, such 
as @love or @bawdy or @Irish. You can use these categories in 
combination with other words or phrases for searching. Child 
ballads are identified as: Child #1, etc. To list all the Child 
ballads, you would enter (at the prompt for a search 
specification) [Child #*]. Wildcards work. If you want a list of 
keyword that we've used, turn on your printer and type <keywords>.
   
     If you wish to give a copy to someone else, feel free. The 
Digital Tradition is copy-encouraged. The most universal format 
for copying is on 360K disks; the copies we've made on higher-
density disks are divided into files that will fit onto eight 
disks using this stone-age format. We'd appreciate it, though, if 
you distributed copies of this printed material along with the 
disks.

   Experiment! You won't damage anything. 

                     THE DIGITAL TRADITION 

Dick Greenhaus * 28 Powell Street, Greenwich, CT 06831 * 203/531-7314

==========================================
example song entry...
==========================================
The Marvelous Toy
(Tom Paxton)

When I was just a wee little lad full of health and joy
My father homeward came one night and gave to me a toy
A wonder to behold, it was, with many colors bright
And the moment I laid eyes on it it became my heart's delight

  It went "zip" when it moved and "bop" when it stopped
    And "whirr" when it stood still
  I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will.

The first time that I picked it up, I had a big surprise
For right on its bottom were two big buttons that
  Looked like big green eyes.
I first pushed one and then the other, and then I twisted its lid
And when I set it down again, this is what it did:

It first marched left and then marched right
And then marched under a chair
And when l looked where it had gone, it wasn't even there:
I started to sob and my daddy laughed, for he knew that I would find,
When l turned around, my marvelous toy, chugging from behind.

Well, the years have gone by too quickly, it seems,
  I have my own little boy
And yesterday I gave to him my marvelous little toy.
His eyes nearly popped right out of his head
  And he gave a squeal of glee,
Neither one of us knows just what it is,
  but he loves it, just like me.

@kids
Written, printed, and recorded by Tom Paxton
Copyright Tom Paxton
filename[ MARVTOY
play.exe MARVTOY
SF

==========================================
example tune file...
==========================================
N-Marvelous Toy
C-Tom Paxton
A-Tom Paxton
T-
S-100
K-D
B-2/2
F-
H-        Verse:
M-5a-4 S-6 D-4 D-4 D-4 F-4 E-4 E-8 E-8 E-4 R-4 D-8 D-5 P-4 D-4 F-4 E-3 a-4
L-        When    I       was     just    a       wee     lit-tle  lad  
full of  health   and     joy.                   My
H-
M-4b-4 b-4 b-4 G-4 a-4 a-4 a-5 D-8 E-5 E-8 E-4 F-4 E-3 a-4
L-        fa-     ther    home-   ward    came    one     night      and
gave       to  me      a        toy.                    A
H-
M-4D-4 D-4 D-4 F-4 E-4 E-4 E-5 E-8 D-8 D-5 F-4 a-4 G-3 G-8 G-8
L-        won-    der     to      be-     hold     it     was,      
with  ma- ny         col-    ors      bright.               And  the
H-                                                                      
Chorus:
M-4b-4 b-4 d-4 b-4 a-4 a-4 F-4 D-8 D-8 E-4 E-4 F-4 D-4 E-2 a-4 a-4
L-        mo-     ment    I      laid     eyes    on      it,     it 
be-  came   my      heart's  de-     light.          It      went
H-
M-4D-4 D-8 D-8 D-4 F-4 E-4 E-8 E-8 E-5 F-8 D-5 D-8 F-4 a-4 G-3 b-4
L-       "zip"   when it  moved   and    "bop"   when it  stopped    and
"whirr"    when  it    stood     still.                  I
H-
M-4b-4 b-4 d-4 b-4 a-4 a-4 F-4 D-8 D-8 E-4 G-4 F-4 C-4 D-3 S-6
L-        nev-    er      knew    just    what     it     was     and  I
guess   I      nev-    er      will.
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk