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The Music Suite

music-suite.github.io

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Re: The Music Suite

#5
I'm very interested in learning more about "Include common notation and theory as a special case" but the documentation for that isn't yet ready, and I also have only elementary knowledge of Haskell. If this means what I think it means, this project could be a great boon to anyone working with non-western music.

For instance, when I first started learning programming my motivation was to create a program to render Byzantine chant, which has a completely different visual representation. Here's an example with the byzantine notation above the western notation (the bottom staff is the ornamentation implied by the byzantine notation): http://www.cappellaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Che...

Another different visual representation is that of shakuhachi music: http://www.rileylee.net/shaku_notation.html

If anyone can offer tips on how to approach this problem, I'd be grateful. But I might have to play with this. The code for my ill-fated attempt for byzantine chant is here, if anyone is interested: https://github.com/muraiki/byzscribe

Re: The Music Suite

#7
Pretty nice. I hope future versions will allow some sort of embedded structures, eg for this segments

  let
      p1 = scat [c..c']^/4
      p2 = delay (1/4) $ scat [c..c']^/4
      p3 = delay (3/4) $ scat [c..c']^/4
  in (accent . legato) (p1  p2  p3)
I would have expected something like

      p2 = delay (1/4) $$ [p1] 
or somesuch (sorry about the notation, I've never used Haskell - my point is about the nesting).

I would also love to see ways to define particular scales and modes and then specify operations within that scale space without necessarily articulating the individual notes. Of course at that point you're getting into compositional tooling rather than transcription.

Anyway, nice work and great documentation so far. Also good that there's a whole bunch of converters.

Re: The Music Suite

#8
As a conservatory student and a long time user of LilyPond, it seems very impractical as a daily musical notation tool after a quick glance at the syntax.

ie: octavesUp 4 c in The Music Suite vs. c'''' in LilyPond

ie: Handling of staves and parts (as well as notes vertical to each other in multiple staves) as a horizontal stack in the code is very opposite of how music notation/engraver needs to think. In LilyPond (and any other music engraving system), you define each part/line as a separate entity and tell the system to put them together. Any discrepancies in how they actually stack up (if one line is not the full duration of a measure at one point) will result in an error with a debug statement.

However, there seems to be some philosophical difference from LilyPond these developers are after. Very interesting and will have to follow.

Re: The Music Suite

#9
post #8

As a conservatory student and a long time user of LilyPond, it seems very impractical as a daily musical notation tool after a quick glance at the syntax. ie: octavesUp 4 c in The Music Suite vs. c'''' in LilyPond ie: Handling of staves and parts (as well as notes vertical to each other in multiple staves) as a horizontal stack in the code is very opposite of how music notation/engraver needs to think. In LilyPond (a…

c'''' is valid in The Music Suite as well.

That said, I won't be switching from ABC for my day-to-day music writing. I see The Music Suite as being useful for, e.g., writing a fugue, where the music can be elegantly expressed programmatically.

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