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neumaRk

A textual language for music, human-readable and machine-interpretable.

neumaRk is a textual way of writing music — clear for people and precise for computers. It sits between traditional music notation and modern digital workflows, making music easy to write, share, analyze, transform, and version.

It is designed to be written directly from the keyboard, with no mouse and no graphical palettes, and is optimized for lead sheets, musical sketches, and harmonic structures — content with one or a few voices, chords, and structure. It is not intended for large orchestral scores, nor to replace traditional notation: it is a complementary foundation, focused on musical meaning rather than graphical rendering.

If you can read chord symbols and rhythmic patterns, you can already read neumaRk.

Where to start

  • What it is, goals, and use cases → Overview (neumaRk_overview.md)
  • The language, in normative detail → Specification (neumaRk_specification.md) and the related documents (notes and durations, chords, flow and repeats, dynamics, text markup, voices, book/playlist collections, …)
  • The language's evolution → Changelog (neumaRk_changelog.md)

The underlying concepts — levels of detail (Compact / Human / Verbose), formal and informal syntax, relationship with traditional notation, design goals — are covered in the Overview.