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Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

lilypond.org

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Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#11

Post by zb »

Since typography relies on human judgement of appearance, people cannot be replaced. However, much of their dull work can be automated: if LilyPond solves most of the common situations correctly, then this will be a huge improvement over existing software. The remaining cases can be tuned by hand.

This is the thing that we so often forget: algorithms can take us a long way, but they can never completely replace judgement. Everybody should read this article, even if they couldn't care less about music notation. (I also particularly enjoyed the section on how not to design software.)

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#12

Post by ptomato »

ssp wrote: post #9
vluft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's open source. Knock yourself out.

When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be editing text files.

So prove them wrong.

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#13

Post by ssp »

ptomato wrote: post #12
ssp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be editing text files.

So prove them wrong.

I can't maintain a fork of lilypond.

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#14

Post by tel »

The care for detail here is overwhelming. Even if you care nothing at all about the content, it's a strong example of what can be achieved by striving for perfection.

I also find it interesting they turned to an algorithm similar to Knuth's TeX algorithm. "Minimizing ugliness" is a pretty potent computational metaphor for how detail oriented design work works, it seems.

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#15

Post by mjcohen »

This reminded me very much of the great effort that Knuth (as a commenter mentioned) put into both his monumental TeX formatting system and MetaFont font generation program in a (imho) successful attempt to enable the preparation of beautiful math documents.

One thing that made TeX so successful is that it was designed to be open, and many packages (e.g., LaTeX) have been written to made it easier to use and more powerful. If LilyPond can be easily extended in the same way (i.e., programed in LilyPond, not C++), it might be similarly influential.

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#16

Post by alextp »

ssp wrote: post #9
vluft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's open source. Knock yourself out.

When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be editing text files.

Another problem is that lilypond is slow, and any WYSIWYG interface to it would either bypass the compiler to show a "preview" of the score or would have a horrible lag whenever the user edited something. This might not be obvious, but adding or removing (or even changing the pitch/duration of) a single note can potentially lead to a solution with completely different appearance (after all it's a dynamic programming algorithm that lays things out, considering all sorts of "badness" in the style of tex). If you remove this specificity for some greedy techniques, then it will no longer have lilypond's quality.

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#17

Post by alextp »

tel wrote: post #14

The care for detail here is overwhelming. Even if you care nothing at all about the content, it's a strong example of what can be achieved by striving for perfection. I also find it interesting they turned to an algorithm similar to Knuth's TeX algorithm. "Minimizing ugliness" is a pretty potent computational metaphor for how detail oriented design work works, it seems.

It goes further than that, and most modern machine learning methods are fundamentally defined in a "minimizing ugliness" framework.

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#19

Post by danbmil99 »

Meh, I was writing out scores for a band; when I started using Finale the musicians thanked me profusely for making it readable.

Unless you can afford your own personal copyist, it's sort of irrelevant. The little formatting nits you learn to work around (or just talk the musicians through it with pencils, which you end up doing anyway for musical reasons)

Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?

#20

Post by vluft »

ssp wrote: post #13
ptomato wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So prove them wrong.

I can't maintain a fork of lilypond.

Well, don't complain then that they don't think your idea is a good idea and aren't going to spend their time (which nobody is paying them for) implementing it.
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