Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by tel » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 3:53 AM UTC

alextp wrote: post #17

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.

Well, yeah, but the metaphor is what I think is interesting. It's technically nothing more than shifting from a deterministic to a statistical model, but the idea of applying statistical algorithms to many aspects where computers need to emulate human design is a powerful heuristic.

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

#22

Post by moultano » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 4:21 AM UTC

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.

I really wish I could just pipe finale files to it and have lilypond make it not suck.

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

#23

Post by three14 » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 6:21 AM UTC

vluft wrote: post #20

ssp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a huge difference between having to maintain a fork and just writing the extra features you want. No one has the right to insist that other people spend the time the way you want them to, but you can certainly complain about their choices being shortsighted.

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

#24

Post by thefool » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 6:33 AM UTC

moultano wrote: post #22

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.

I really wish I could just pipe finale files to it and have lilypond make it not suck.

why is this not possible? Have the program read the "notes" from the finale file, format them into the lillypad format, and have its compiler spit the beautified version back out to you.

This would be the equivilent of building a "quick preview gui" for lillypad.

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

#25

Post by hnote » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 6:49 AM UTC

zweiterlinde wrote: post #10

I've been dying for the inverse of lilypond;an app that would allow you to take a picture and turn it into text notation/MIDI would be awesome. That said, I used lilypond a couple of years ago and loved it.

There is an open source Audiveris http://audiveris.kenai.com/ (link currently down, cache at http://bit.ly/99yvbm) and commercial SmartScore http://www.musitek.com/smartscre.html (400$)

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

#26

Post by cabalamat » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 10:55 AM UTC

One sentence that struck me was "Notation is an intricate symbolic diagramming language for visualizing an often much simpler musical concept."

Now if you remove the word "musical", it's true of notation in general. Any notation should reflect the structure of the thing it is notating; if music notation is typically more complex than the "often much simpler musical concept" then I would say musical notation is broken and should be changed.

Is musical notation broken? I've no idea, I don't know enough about it to say.

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

#27

Post by timclark » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 11:15 AM UTC

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.

Some people, like me for example, find it easier to edit the text files than to muck about with a mouse in a graphical editor, selecting or failing to select the note, selecting the note duration from a pallet or menu, seems to take forever - in Lilypond I would just type c4 d2 e4 and I am done. JEdit provides a good preview mode and integration if you require it.

However, the Lilypond input syntax could be improved a great deal - I don't think the multiple different types of braces used in syntax files should be necessary for example.

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

#28

Post by cwfreeman » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 11:43 AM UTC

cabalamat wrote: post #26

One sentence that struck me was "Notation is an intricate symbolic diagramming language for visualizing an often much simpler musical concept." Now if you remove the word "musical", it's true of notation in general. Any notation should reflect the structure of the thing it is notating; if music notation is typically more complex than the "often much simpler musical concept" then I would say musical notation is broken…

From their point of view, it is much more complex than any given musical concept because it has to encode such a wide variety of musical concepts. The musician playing it doesn't (intentionally) pay attention to the complexities that Lilypad is talking about. (I've never noticed stem lengths or stem directions when playing, but they're important to keep things legible.)

It's comparable to fonts: the study of fonts is pretty intricate, regardless of whether you're writing a grocery list or "One Hundred Years Of Solitude".

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

#29

Post by socksy » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 11:59 AM UTC

I find it interesting they refer to notes as quarter values or eighths. I can quickly see myself getting confused by that (is that a quaver? Did I do it right?) - does it change if you change the time signature from 4/4 to 3/4? (forgive the slashes)

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

#30

Post by augustl » Thu, Jul 15, 2010, 12:46 PM UTC

ssp wrote: post #5

It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.

I would like to see the usable GUI supporting all semantics from the text interface. Writing Lilypond notation compares to writing software, and we all know why programming is largely done with text and not with GUIs.