Overview
Guitar Tablature (tabs) is a popular notation that musicians use to convey musical ideas. In the information age, more and more musicians are harnessing the power of electronic guitar tabs. Originally, guitar tablature was an ASCII-format. However, different musicians would use different character sets to represent different musical elements (such as trills, hammer-offs, dynamics, etc) and there was never any standardization of the ASCII-format.
Companies that build music software tried to remedy this difficulty by introducing a couple standard formats. The two prevailing standards are guitar pro (.gp5) and power tab (.ptb). Several commercial and open source editors exist that allow one to compose/read tablature and save in one or both of these formats. Sites such as Ultimate Guitar (http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/) and 911Tabs (http://www.911tabs.com/) house giant tab libraries where anybody can freely download tabs, which exist for virtually every popular song. Hobbyist and professional musicians contribute tabs to these databases daily.
The problem that Lunar Tabs tries to address is that none of the tab readers are built with accessibility in mind. None of the existing readers are screen-reader friendly so a person who is blind would have difficulty using them.
To solve this problem, Lunar Tabs takes as input an electronic guitar tab in guitar pro or power tab format and generates a sequence of text instructions for playing a particular piece. For example, if an “A” appears on the guitar tab, Lunar Tabs might output the instructions {“Play third string second fret, quarter note”}. These instructions could then be accessed by a screen reader. A person who is blind, armed with Lunar Tabs, would have the ability to learn any song they wanted by harnessing the giant tab libraries online.
Download
User Manual
Source Code
Developers
Current Developers
- Ankit Tandon
- Edward Ma
- Prateek Tandon
Project Alumni
- Taral Patel
- Ramya Venkateswaran
- Rubaiz Virk
- Chris Leung
Concept Provided by
- Kelly Wills
Project Notes
Project Status
- Alpha
License
Platform
- PC (Java)
- Android