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

LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

lilypond.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 89 posts

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#61

Post by Tokkemon »

echoangle wrote: post #12

Interesting 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?

I'm a professional engraver. How much time you got? lol There's about 200-300 "standard" symbols for music notation, but that can balloon to upwards of 2,000 when factoring in all the nooks and crannies of the artform. Then you have to know what they all mean in order to convey the musical meaning the composer intends. Then you have to understand the psychology of players and what they would expect on a sheet of music and account for that. The "fixed positions" are very mailable depending on context, especially once we start factoring in accidentals and multiple voices on a single staff which can change the horizontal spacing in all sorts of dramatic ways. Then we have to deal with layout of the score so its density looks even and flows well, and has good page turns. Oh, and transposing instruments, cuz we still do that. And I haven't even mentioned lyrics for singers yet, which add tons and tons of new problems to solve.

It's a grueling art form, frankly, but I love it and I wouldn't do anything else.

Context: I'm Senior Product Designer for Sibelius and founder of Music Engraving Tips on Facebook/YouTube.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#62

Post by Tokkemon »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #38

What does Lilypond offer that other robust, free, and open-source notation programs like Musescore don’t?

Much more robust engraving support, and, frankly, being actually open source as opposed to owned by a big conglomerate who's gobbling up music companies right and left.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#63

Post by Tokkemon »

max_ wrote: post #17

I have been having this Idea for a few years now. Why can't we just writ music like code. Executable & all.

The biggest problem is so much of music notation's meaning is defined by it's graphical information, not just the content. This is where it differs significantly from code or even text typesetting. At some point, you have to get into the nitty gritty of where to place symbols on the page. Lillypond gets you part of the way, but the last part is really hard to do and most users are more comfortable with a WYSIWYG setup.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#64

Post by bjoli »

singingfish wrote: post #58
nicklecompte wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is closely related to computational typesetting, e.g. TeX, which is an extremely complicated piece of software. While it might be true that music notation is ultimately "simpler" than document typesetting, I wouldn't stake money on that claim. A somewhat ignorant TL;DR: - It's probably not too difficult to render simple music in a bland, ugly way, in the same way that it's not too difficult to render ASCI…

> I play jazz and don't fully believe in Western music notation :) My friend - accomplished classical musician and now pretty well known jazz musician tells me you can't write down latin music accurately. Personally I think while written language is largely about conveying a fairly unambiguous meaning, written music is really about providing enough for the player / or conductor to be able to infer what they need to d…

You can't write any music accurately. Ask her if she can write a later Miles Davis solo accurately so that anybody can perform it just as he plays it :)

I work in a much more notation-bound genre (I am an orchestra bassoon player) and I would say you would struggle a LOT to notate twinkle twinkle little star in a way that makes everyone perform it the same.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#65

Post by bjoli »

o11c wrote: post #11

The problem with lilypond is that it's a write-only language. Due to so many macros, it can't be parsed, only executed. So its main value to me is as an intermediate output format. Because its output is amazing. (to me, an ideal music representation should be 2-dimensional, consisting of multiple parallel data and markup channels, then each rendering should be able to select a subset)

I have a set of standard macros. I rarely write more.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#66

Post by dsubburam »

jamesear wrote: post #43

Excuse my ignorance, I'm about to ask stupid questions. * What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing? * Do people typically use this to compose their own music, or are they recreating music they know? * How similar is sheet music to source c…

* What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing?

--I think people who play/practice musical instruments regularly, esp. in an ensemble, esp. in classical music (where the written notes are referred to a lot); to make arrangements, transcriptions, instrument parts, etc. out of the originals to perform for fun. I'dn't be surprised if programmer folks are overrepresented in this group. (I am one of them).

* How similar is sheet music to source code? Does any software interpret it to output audio?

--I'd like to say quite similar, but upon further thought, maybe not. e.g. In sheet music, there's no ready equivalent to functions taking arguments and returning values. Maybe the similarity is with compiled/machine code (which I am not familiar with).

* How expressive is sheet music? How constrained do you feel trying to convey your idea onto this format? Does it support abstraction, or making your own abstractions?

--It is quite expressive. Most musical material that people come up with in their minds will likely be adequately represented in sheet music. I haven't seen "user-defined" sheet music notation, which I think is what you may mean by abstractions. I suppose it could be done (and supported by LilyPond).

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#68

Post by gpvos »

jamesear wrote: post #43

Excuse my ignorance, I'm about to ask stupid questions. * What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing? * Do people typically use this to compose their own music, or are they recreating music they know? * How similar is sheet music to source c…

It has been used for large professional publications such as the 2013 Dutch protestant hymnal (>1000 songs, versions with and without accompaniment).

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#69

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

turtlebits wrote: post #50
jamesear wrote: post #43

Excuse my ignorance, I'm about to ask stupid questions. * What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing? * Do people typically use this to compose their own music, or are they recreating music they know? * How similar is sheet music to source c…

A lot of older classical scores have poor scans, low res, or are hand written. If I enjoy a piece, I'll redo the notation and upload it (generally to IMSLP). I have a MIDI piano so I end up using the keys to input, which can be fairly quick, depending on the piece.

What software do you use to get the MIDI inputs into Lilypond?

(and thank you for contributing to IMSLP, one of the great commons of the internet)

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#70

Post by jononor »

turtlebits wrote: post #50
jamesear wrote: post #43

Excuse my ignorance, I'm about to ask stupid questions. * What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing? * Do people typically use this to compose their own music, or are they recreating music they know? * How similar is sheet music to source c…

A lot of older classical scores have poor scans, low res, or are hand written. If I enjoy a piece, I'll redo the notation and upload it (generally to IMSLP). I have a MIDI piano so I end up using the keys to input, which can be fairly quick, depending on the piece.

IMSPL looks go be https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page It seems that some uploads are just PDFs, while others include Lilypond files.
Post reply on HN