Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 50 posts

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#41

Post by jacobolus »

Koshkin wrote: post #24
Fede_V wrote: post #9

On top of being a genius, reading Knuth is such a pleasant experience. Without having ever interacted with him, he comes across as such a wonderful soul.

Yes, that's one advantage of being a genius - reading books that seem difficult to others becomes a pleasant experience.

You definitely don’t need to be a genius to read any of Knuth’s books. You do need to go slowly and patiently and work hard at it though (or have significant past experience / preparation).

Knuth’s work is full of dry wit, and it’s possible to spend much of the time giggling as you read.

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#42

Post by jacobolus »

ktRolster wrote: post #37
organsnyder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience. I did quite a bit of engraving using LilyPond as part of my music publishing company (a catalog of around 100 organ, choral, and/or instrumental works, many of them quite complex). I always entered the notation by hand, using the Frescobaldi editor to give easier previewing and various shortcuts. I'm an organist myself, and entering music that way became extremely fluid—to the point that I f…

Cool. Do you have a sample of some music you did, so I can figure out how to work with it easily? Thanks.

I’m not remotely proficient in music engraving, but I found it pretty straight forward to type a few pages of music into Lilypond format a few years ago, just using a regular plain text editor.

Comparable to writing (La)TeX for mathematics I’d say.

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#43

Post by Jun8 »

jcoffland wrote: post #27
esaym wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my early days of learning to program, I spent a lot of time writing console and web apps to better organize bible notes and linking verses together as I read through the bible. Then for extra "fun", I made a spam bot that would post my random notes and verses on various forums (and yes I know as my colleagues told me "that's unethical as hell"). But nonetheless, I was interested in it. I wrote most of the console…

> straight C++ without objects That is sacrilegious. I believe most people call that kind of C++ C.

It's actually called C+.

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#44

Post by esaym »

jcoffland wrote: post #27
esaym wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my early days of learning to program, I spent a lot of time writing console and web apps to better organize bible notes and linking verses together as I read through the bible. Then for extra "fun", I made a spam bot that would post my random notes and verses on various forums (and yes I know as my colleagues told me "that's unethical as hell"). But nonetheless, I was interested in it. I wrote most of the console…

> straight C++ without objects That is sacrilegious. I believe most people call that kind of C++ C.

but but... I used cout and cin!!

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#45

Post by gumby »

internaut wrote: post #8

This is cool. The organ is infrequently used because it is so huge but if you want high drama it's the right tool for the job. Interstellar on church organ is intense. Feel inspired here: https://youtu.be/zg5QMysuSYg

> The organ is infrequently used because it is so huge

Knuth has one at home (fun fact: so does Alan Kay). He sat down with me and went through the score with me -- it's full of great puns (e.g. the beginning is an inverted Toccata und Fuge d-Moll) but, well, he shouldn't quit his day job. Which admittedly is doing whatever he wants!

He's also really really amazing on the keyboard. We saw him on the street the other day and my kid pointed and said "Look, there's that awesome harpsichord player!" I've tried to explain that he's an amazing computer scientist but kiddo has different priorities: computer scientists are a dime a dozen while harpsichord players, well, they're rare.

(I'm going to get my revenge by forcing the kid to program in MIX).

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#46

Post by greglindahl »

internaut wrote: post #11
joshmarlow wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome, thank you for sharing. Is there any kind of genre or name associated with epic organ music?

Dramatic music has deep roots in our classical tradition. It is something that is richly influenced by culture which is interesting. A typical example is Carmina Burana, which qualifies as the 'most damn German thing ever' to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFSK0ogeg4 It's not exclusively about the pipe organ but think people on Youtube refer to examples of it as 'Epic Music', often inspired by visuals from film…

By Carmina Burana, you mean the Carl Orff version? Because that's basically unrelated to the Medieval piece. Definitely "richly influenced by modern culture", compared to the original.

There's a ton of music actually written for the organ which is quite interesting, in a variety of styles.

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#48

Post by RandomOpinion »

esaym wrote: post #44
jcoffland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> straight C++ without objects That is sacrilegious. I believe most people call that kind of C++ C.

but but... I used cout and cin!!

If you read the C++ FQA (not a typo), cout/cin might be a couple of the parts of C++ you shouldn't use. :)

http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/io.html#fqa-15.1

Re: Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

#50

Post by organsnyder »

ktRolster wrote: post #37
organsnyder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience. I did quite a bit of engraving using LilyPond as part of my music publishing company (a catalog of around 100 organ, choral, and/or instrumental works, many of them quite complex). I always entered the notation by hand, using the Frescobaldi editor to give easier previewing and various shortcuts. I'm an organist myself, and entering music that way became extremely fluid—to the point that I f…

Cool. Do you have a sample of some music you did, so I can figure out how to work with it easily? Thanks.

I don't have any samples handy, but here are some pointers:

1. Before starting, number the measures on the original score. I write the number every fifth measure.

2. Before engraving any actual notes, I'll make a voice that is entirely "skips", plus time signatures, key changes, barlines, etc. I include this voice on each stave.

3. I always try to deconstruct the piece into individual voices. Of course, this is straightforward for many pieces (choral and instrumental especially), but every piece with good voice-leading can be broken up like this. My music theory background (I was a Music & Comp-Sci double-major in college), along with my experience as a chorister and organist, helps me a lot with this.

4. Engrave one voice at a time. For some pieces, this means that I'm engraving half of a stave's notes (or less) in each pass.

5. In most cases, I put a single measure on each line. I make sure to use bar-checks whenever possible (once in a while they won't work, if I'm doing something weird that confuses LilyPond). Every fifth measure, I add a comment with the measure number (to match up with the numbers I've written on the physical score).

6. I use LilyPond's various built-in checks (bar number checks, octave checks...) liberally. They're very similar to unit tests, in that they allow for much easier "refactoring" down the line.

7. The right environment helps a lot. When I was doing tons of engraving, I had a document holder with a movable marker to help me keep my place. I rotated one of my monitors to portrait to show a full page; I'd keep the markup on the other monitor, and had a keyboard shortcut set up to easily run LilyPond as needed. I'd often run it after making just a change or too.

8. LilyPond's layout engine is astonishingly good, but I'd still have to make tweaks to the final output in some cases. I had a macro set up so that I could do a quick /moveGrob to tweak the extra-offset property of a grob to move it without changing the behavior of the layout engine.

Post reply on HN