examples/beethoven5.umsg
%unimsg 0 music/beethoven-5/v2 · 192 lines · 8826 bytes of text · 6025 bytes canonical · the raw file
Point at anything below — a sigil, a literal, a brace — and the card says what it is. Keyboard: tab through the document. Every explanation is also printed in full beneath the source.
%unimsg 0 music/beethoven-5/v2
-- Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 — the whole work, as far as this document
-- honestly reaches.
--
-- Read the scope block before anything else. The four movements are described
-- in full: their keys, metres, forms, tempo markings, instrumentation and
-- approximate durations. The *notes* are not here, except for the opening
-- twenty-one bars of the first movement, which are a hand-authored audible
-- reduction and are marked as such.
--
-- The distinction is the point. Encoding a description of a symphony is a
-- different act from encoding a symphony, and a document that blurred the two
-- would be worse than one that admits the gap: a reader has no way to tell a
-- transcription from an invention by looking at it, so the document has to
-- say. Every field below carries what it is derived from.
--
-- The work itself is long out of copyright. What limits this file is fidelity,
-- not permission.
symphony @beethoven/op67 {
title "Symphony No. 5 in C minor"
catalogue "Op. 67"
composer "Ludwig van Beethoven"
completed 1808
premiered { date 1808-12-22, venue "Theater an der Wien, Vienna" }
dedication "Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky"
key :c-minor
movements 4
-- ===================================================================
-- WHAT IS AND IS NOT ENCODED
-- ===================================================================
scope {
described "all four movements: key, metre, form, tempo marking,
instrumentation, approximate duration"
sounded "the first movement, bars 1-21 only, as a two-voice reduction"
not-encoded "the note-level content of the work — roughly half an hour of
orchestral music across four movements and some tens of
thousands of note events"
why-not "It is not available to whoever wrote this file. Reconstructing it
from memory would produce a plausible table of numbers that was
not Beethoven, and nothing in the document or the reader could
tell the difference afterwards. An invented transcription is worse
than an absent one, because it is indistinguishable from a real
one and it travels."
how-to-complete-it "Convert a real source. Public-domain encodings of this
work exist as Humdrum kern, MusicXML and MIDI; each
carries onset, duration and pitch, which is three of
the four numbers the tones primitive needs, and level
can be taken from dynamics or set flat. The conversion
is mechanical and belongs in a tool, not in this file."
what-that-would-cost "Around 30 000 to 60 000 tone records, or a few
megabytes of text. Large for a document and
unremarkable for the format — the limit here is the
source, not the encoding."
}
-- ===================================================================
-- THE MOVEMENTS
-- ===================================================================
-- Approximate durations: performances vary widely, particularly over whether
-- the first-movement exposition repeat is taken. Stated to the nearest
-- minute and marked approximate rather than given a false precision.
structure [
| no marking key metre form approx-minutes
| 1 "Allegro con brio" :c-minor "2/4" "sonata" 7
| 2 "Andante con moto" :a-flat "3/8" "double variations" 10
| 3 "Allegro" :c-minor "3/4" "scherzo and trio" 5
| 4 "Allegro" :c-major "4/4" "sonata" 11
]
continuity "The third movement runs into the fourth without a break, through
a sustained transition over a held string chord. The scherzo's
material returns inside the finale, which is why the two are
often counted as one span."
-- ===================================================================
-- INSTRUMENTATION
-- ===================================================================
instrumentation {
throughout [
"2 flutes", "2 oboes", "2 clarinets in B flat", "2 bassoons",
"2 horns in E flat", "2 trumpets in C", "timpani in C and G", "strings"
]
added-in-the-finale [ "piccolo", "contrabassoon", "3 trombones" ]
note "The three trombones are the ones usually cited as the first in a
symphony. They are held back until the finale, so the change of
instrumentation is itself part of the work's argument rather than a
fixed roster."
}
-- ===================================================================
-- THE SOUNDED EXCERPT
-- ===================================================================
excerpt {
covers "movement 1, bars 1-21"
is "a hand-authored audible reduction, not a transcription"
voices 2
derived-from "the rhythm and contour of the opening figure and its
immediate sequence, written out by hand"
fidelity "approximate: one voice carries the figure and its ascent, a
second sustains beneath. Orchestration, dynamics, articulation
and the inner parts are absent."
why-it-is-here "To show that a document can be played by a reader that
knows nothing about music. That is a claim about the format,
not about the edition — and it is demonstrated as well by
twelve seconds as by half an hour."
}
-- Not tagged for any particular reader any more. The columns carry their own
-- units — milliseconds in the key suffixes, hertz by name — and a reader that
-- knows what those units are can work out what this is without being told.
-- Whether it does is the point of leaving the tag off.
opening {
onset :at-ms
duration :for-ms
pitch :Hz
level :level
wave :triangle
notes [
| at-ms for-ms hz level note
| 139 120 392.00 0.95 "G4"
| 278 120 392.00 0.95 "G4"
| 417 120 392.00 0.95 "G4"
| 556 1500 311.13 0.90 "Eb4"
| 2455 120 349.23 0.95 "F4"
| 2594 120 349.23 0.95 "F4"
| 2733 120 349.23 0.95 "F4"
| 2872 1900 293.66 0.90 "D4"
| 4600 2600 130.81 0.50 "C3"
| 5092 120 392.00 0.85 "G4"
| 5231 120 392.00 0.85 "G4"
| 5370 120 392.00 0.85 "G4"
| 5509 555 311.13 0.81 "Eb4"
| 6124 120 415.30 0.85 "Ab4"
| 6263 120 415.30 0.85 "Ab4"
| 6402 120 415.30 0.85 "Ab4"
| 6541 555 349.23 0.81 "F4"
| 7156 120 466.16 0.85 "Bb4"
| 7295 120 466.16 0.85 "Bb4"
| 7400 2000 103.83 0.50 "Ab2"
| 7434 120 466.16 0.85 "Bb4"
| 7573 555 392.00 0.81 "G4"
| 8188 120 523.25 0.85 "C5"
| 8327 120 523.25 0.85 "C5"
| 8466 120 523.25 0.85 "C5"
| 8605 555 415.30 0.81 "Ab4"
| 9220 120 587.33 0.85 "D5"
| 9359 120 587.33 0.85 "D5"
| 9498 120 587.33 0.85 "D5"
| 9500 2600 98.00 0.50 "G2"
| 9637 832 466.16 0.81 "Bb4"
]
}
-- ===================================================================
-- PROVENANCE
-- ===================================================================
provenance {
rights "The work entered the public domain long ago. This file's limits are
about accuracy, not permission — a distinction worth keeping
separate, because they call for different remedies."
facts-from "Standard reference knowledge about the work: keys, metres,
forms, instrumentation and the premiere. Durations are
approximate and marked so."
tones-from "Hand authoring, not a score. Stated in the excerpt block above
and repeated here because a reader may arrive at either."
version-note "v1 of this document described itself as the opening only. v2
describes the whole work and still sounds only the opening;
the scope block is what carries that difference, and it is
first in the file for that reason."
}
}
The canonical encoding
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73examples/beethoven5.umsg 6025 bytesEvery construct on this page
The formal columns are read from the specification when this page is generated. The last column is this site's plain-language gloss and is not normative — where they differ, the specification is right.
| construct | glyph | carries | example | gloss |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| :annotation | — | — | — | A bare name qualifying the value after it—for example a language tag or a unit such as kg. It is not a value itself; a bare name with nothing after it is an error, not a guess. |
| :array | ^ | type, or type:shape; then [ elements ] | ^f64 [ 1.5, 2.5 ] or ^i16:2x3 [ … ] | A packed, homogeneous numeric array. The ^ marker gives every element its type and may also give the row-major shape: ^f64:2x3 [ … ]. |
| :array-element | — | — | — | One element of a typed array. Its type comes from the ^ marker, so 1.5 inside ^f64 is binary64 rather than an exact decimal. |
| :array-missing | — | — | — | A missing position in a typed array. null here is not an element value: it adds a validity mask while preserving the array's shape. |
| :block | — | — | — | A block: named pairs, in braces. Its keys are sorted in the encoding and shown here as written. |
| :bytes | ~ | encoding:data | ~hex:ff00 or ~b64:iVBORw0KGgo= | Raw octets, carried as octets. No base64 tax, no pretending they are text. |
| :comment | -- | to end of line | -- a note | A note for people. It travels with the pair it precedes and never reaches the bytes. |
| :decimal | — | — | — | An exact decimal. 19.99 is nineteen and ninety-nine hundredths, not the nearest double to it. |
| :extension | ! | name, then value | !acme/hint { zone 4 } | A qualifier this reader may not know. It survives the round trip intact, and stays legible on the way past — the rule that separates an extension from a private convention. |
| :float | — | — | — | A binary float, marked so it can never be mistaken for the exact decimal beside it. |
| :hash | # | algorithm:hex | #sha256:deadbeef | The digest of some content, with the algorithm said out loud so it is still meaningful in ten years. |
| :header | % | unimsg only | %unimsg 0 label | Declares the format version and what this document is. Optional, and useful exactly when a file arrives without context. |
| :identifier | @ | word | @ord-88213 | Gives this value a name, so another document can point at it without copying it. |
| :integer | — | — | — | A whole number of any size. Past 2^53 it is still exact, which is the whole reason this is not JSON. |
| :key | — | — | — | A field name: the first thing in a pair. It is bare when possible and quoted when needed, and names the content without becoming part of the value. |
| :reference | -> | an identifier or a path | -> @cust-4471, -> @lexicon.entries.kitāb | Points at a name. Nothing follows it while reading — resolution is somebody else's job, deliberately. |
| :reserved-literal | — | — | — | One of six bare words that are values rather than names. The list is fixed, so no value is coerced by what it looks like. |
| :sequence | — | — | — | An ordered list. Order is preserved and is meaning. |
| :string | — | — | — | Text. May span lines, so prose does not have to be escaped into one. |
| :symbol | : | word | :dispatched | A name from a fixed vocabulary, not free text. :high is a value someone chose; "high" is a phrase someone typed. |
| :table-row | | | cells | | sku qty | One record of a table. A table is sugar for a sequence of blocks with the same keys, and encodes identically to the longhand. |
| — | — | — | A temporal value at the precision written. 2026-08 stays a month, and 03:52 stays a wall-clock time; neither is widened into an invented instant. |