PMW
PMW stands for Philip’s Music Writer, written by Philip Hazel.
Usage
Enclose PMW fragment with [pmw] and [/pmw] pair.
Official Documentation
Though online documentation is scarce, the reference document inside source code package is fairly complete. (A copy of PDF is stored on this site.) There are a few examples available on official PMW site as well.
Other external documentation
None discovered yet.
Getting started
As a starter, let’s take a look at the three-blind-mice rhythm again as used in other tutorials:
[pmw] time C [stave 1 treble 1] e d C | @1 [endstave] [/pmw]
(no midi download)
PMW score is divided into header section and stave sections: header section contain info about the score itself, like sheet dimension, time, key etc., though there is no clear identifier labelling header section. Staves are enclosed in sections, like this:
[stave 1 ...]
......
[endstave]
Multiple sections are allowed. Therefore the whole PMW score structure is:
(headers...)[stave 1 (attributes...)]
......
[endstave][stave 2 (attributes...)]
......
[endstave]......
- Use ‘
time‘ keyword for time signature: C means common time. (default is 4/4) - “
[stave 1 treble 1]“: each stave is actually a voice, which means we can combine 2 or more voices into a single stave (not covered here). “treble” means using treble clef. The final “1″ is a bit unobvious: it means using middle C as the basis when specifying octaves (though not useful here in such simplistic example). - PMW is a bit different from other notations on specifying note lengths. Lower case letters denote crotchet, and upper case letters denote minim.
- Each vertical bar denotes a simple barline.
- The final “@1″ is not a mandatory bar count; the “@” sign is simply a comment, anything after “@” is ignored. The “@1″ is just a practise to remind people how many bars have been typesetted. Of course you can insert comment anywhere in the score as well.
- After finishing a voice or stave, append “
[endstave]” to it.
View some more examples in action.
