Google:Summer of Code - Qin music notation generator

What's Qin?

The qin or quqin (zither or old zither) has a long history in China. It is mentioned in the Book of Odes (Shi Jing) and Confucious is said to have played it as well, thus we know it existed long before 200 B.C.E. Some have said that the shape of the instrument has not changed
since the late Han dynasty, which is roughly two thousand years ago between 200-500 C.E. Although many of the current pieces played on the qin are from the Ming and Qing dynasties and may be "only" 200 to 500 years old, some pieces exist that may have started musically in B.C.E times as with the famous piece "Flowing Water" (Liu Shui), said to have been created by the legendary qin player Bo Ya. Flowing Water was included on the Voyager satellite launched in 1977 as played by the famous 20th century qin master Guan Ping-hu. Thus Flowing Water has been played by qin players for three millenia.

The qin belonged to the old scholar class who ruled China until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. They celebrated it in poetry and in painting. Emperors played it, poets like Li Bo mentioned it in poetry, and painters often would include it in a painting. The scholar class invested the qin with an ideology that might on the one hand manifest itself as a subtle form of reflective meditation through playing or on the other hand view the qin as a physical object of connoisseurship. Thus a scholar might collect antique qin and hang them on his studio wall. Much of the music for the qin is said to be thematic in the sense that it is related to nature (and Taoism) including pieces like Gao Shan (High Mountains), Liu Shui (Flowing Water), or Ping Sha Lo Yan (Geese at the Seashore), The qin certainly has been influenced by Taoism, however other songs include thematic material taken from history, philosophy (Confucionism and Buddhism), and even occasionally romance.

The old scholar class was said to practice "qin qi shu hua", "the four arts of the gentleman":

qin, the art of playing the qin
qi, the art of playing go
shu, the art of calligraphy
hua, the art of painting

Thus in theory scholars would know how to play a few qin melodies. As the qin belonged to the "writing class", scholars of an artistic bent wrote many essays and collected qin songs which they published in books called "qin-pu" or qin handbooks. Hundreds of qin-pu exist with many songs (not all songs are currently played). Although there are some individual songs on paper that probably predate the early Ming dynasty, in general most traditional books of songs date from around 1425 to around the time of the Qing dynasty's collapse.

The nature of traditional written qin music is a gesture-oriented tablature. Complex symbols describe the motions of the left and right hands. Scholars believe that sometime between the Tang and Song dynasties a set of simplified Chinese characters were created that took an old long-hand verbose set of instructions for the left hand and right hand written in classical Chinese and combined them into a more terse form. Thus a composite qin symbol that looks like an ordinary Chinese character, but in a sense is more like a sentence worth of instruction, tells the player how to make a note with a combined left and right hand gesture. The basic components were taken from existing Chinese characters and could be combined and recombined to create simple and complex gestures that might for example say:

at string 3, at left-hand stop position 10, using the right hand middle finger play towards the player.

follow this by sliding the left-hand up to position 9 and do nothing with the right hand.

now with the left hand not pressing any strings, with the right hand ring finger brush all the strings from string 7 to string 1

These "sentences" are expressed with qin symbols in a very concise form and in fact the above would only require around four symbols. The bottom line is that the traditional qin tablature is made up out of component Chinese characters, but the combined results may take many forms and of course no existing Chinese font set would have them or be able to deal with the resulting complexity. Even today it is normal in the printing of modern qin music for the transcriber to use traditional ink-based calligraphy to write out the qin music and then somehow photographically insert the images onto the printed page. From the font creation view, there are many difficulties. A composer could invent a new symbol. Furthermore existing handbooks may in some cases document the individual character components, but the handbooks do not always agree on the atomic class of symbols! In addition older handbooks from the Ming dynasty may use some symbols that have more or less dropped out of use in later handbooks.

In the 20th century, Chinese musicologists determined that the traditional qin handbook had a pedagogical flaw. Traditional qin handbooks were often issued as a memorization aide. As a result they did not include any indication of tempo. Therefore we can distinguish two forms of qin handbooks in print,

traditional books that do not include any form of musical staff notation (to provide at least the tempo),
and the modern form that does include western staff notation with the tempo (and note values).

Modern handbooks typically match modern books in their layout. Thus the qin tablatures goes from left to right on the page and from top to bottom underneath musical staff notation. Traditional books match traditional books written in classical Chinese. The qin-pu sans staff notation goes from right to left and top to bottom on the page.

For examples of recorded qin music, see:

For more general information about the qin, please see:

source from: http://www.guqin.com/