I have been having this Idea for a few years now. Why can't we just writ music like code. Executable & all.
Then you might like 'faust' or 'pure data'.
LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#22Personal story: Over a decade ago, when I was learning to play the piano, I made an arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for my girlfriend (now my wife). While the arrangement was pretty basic, I also wanted to present a printed score and that's when I turned to LilyPond.
Here are the files if anyone is interested to take a peek: https://susam.net/files/music/twinkle-twinkle-little-star/>. The .ly file has the LilyPond code. The .midi and .pdf files were generated from it automatically. The .mp3 and .ogg have the audio recording of the music played manually on an electronic keyboard.
Please note that the LilyPond code might not reflect optimal or idiomatic practices, given that I was new to both music and LilyPond at that time. Nevertheless, it was very satisfying to see the polished output generated by LilyPond. I remember getting the same kind of satisfaction when I discovered LaTeX about two decades ago and realised that I could finally render mathematical formulas beautifully that look exactly how they should look.
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#23EDIT: Deleted for copyright violation
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#24Interesting that Music notation even seems to be a “challenge” to do with a computer, speaking as a complete layman. It seems like there is only a few note symbols to draw, at fixed positions. Can someone explain what makes good engraving good?
https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/essay.pdf is a really good explanation - simplistic "make music notes like characters in a font" gets you the information, but it is NOT at all beautiful and actively fights against you, the same way badly typeset and kerned text is hard to read.
that is incredibly interesting, thank you!
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#25Interesting that Music notation even seems to be a “challenge” to do with a computer, speaking as a complete layman. It seems like there is only a few note symbols to draw, at fixed positions. Can someone explain what makes good engraving good?
There are numerous symbols to represent pitch on a staff, numerous other symbols that can be attached to the pitch symbols that represent changes in duration, dynamics, various techniques and more. These symbols can be stacked above and below the pitch symbols, to the sides of the symbols and more. There are other symbols that can span multiple pitch symbols, groups of symbols and more. There are more symbols that control the tempo of the playback of the score, the number of times sections of the score should be repeated and other symbols that will move the current playback location of the score to some other place. The placement of all of these symbols have "rules" but these rules are really suggestions and composers will always want to adjust and bend these rules. If a system implements strict rules, that system will come under criticism as being inflexible. There seems to always an exception to every rule of music notation.
I have been working on music notation software for almost forty years and have seen programmers come and go with their attempts to "solve" the problem of music notation. It is a very difficult problem. Once upon a time SCORE [1] was considered the best of the best on music engraving software. I worked with Leland Smith to update the program to more platforms. Sadly, the SCORE source code is not available and the rights of the source code are unclear after Leland's passing. Many music publishing companies continued to maintain systems using SCORE for quite a while.
The notation engine of my iOS music notation program Komp [2] is available here: https://github.com/SemitoneGene/notation. This code is most certainly not the best or most complete, but it is easy to read and comprehend if you want to see the complexity involved. MuseScore has also been mentioned in other posts.
If I were to do a commercial engraving of a music score, I would use Dorico. It is being developed by who I would consider the most insightful and understanding group of developers who have a real desire to make the best music engraving program.
LilyPond produces very good output but offers its own series of challenges to use. MuseScore is a nice program, but it has a long way to go to meet the demands of the high professional composition and engraving market.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(software)
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#26I tried to learn LilyPond once but it was a bit too arcane for my taste. Now I use MuseScore, WYSIWYG notation program which is a lot more intuitive (and, like LilyPond, also released under the GPL). I write relatively simple music, though, mostly lead sheets. I always imagined LilyPond would shine in more complex scoring situations.
I only use LilyPond for engraving, and MuseScore for input. They complement each other that way as a free software replacement for the usual commercial options.
The (former, IIRC) product manager for MuseScore (aka @tantacrul) has claimed that he thinks that MuseScore is now doing better engraving than LilyPond. He has a vested interest, obviously, but he's also a smart and conscientious human being.
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#27Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#28Over a decade ago, I was doing some composing and so I tried every free composition program, as well as trials of commercial ones.
In the end, only LilyPond was easy and intuitive to use, due to relying on text editing that you already know, instead of incomprehensible editing paradigms where weird, invisible things happen.
I was easily able to find out how to include everything I wanted in the output, like fingering indications and chord diagrams.
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#29I tried to learn LilyPond once but it was a bit too arcane for my taste. Now I use MuseScore, WYSIWYG notation program which is a lot more intuitive (and, like LilyPond, also released under the GPL). I write relatively simple music, though, mostly lead sheets. I always imagined LilyPond would shine in more complex scoring situations.
LilyPond rules when you want to manipulate music algorithmically. Like make a music reading training app that creates examples based on your performance so far.
Seems like one of the libraries that can output Lilypond (like music21, mingus, abjad, or music-suite) would be better for that purpose.
Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
#30[dead]