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

71–80 of 89 posts

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#71

Post by ziotom78 »

jraph wrote: post #16

As a matter of fact, I started learning LilyPond last weekend using Frescobaldi, because of its awesome midi input, and because I figured I might get more efficient with code than with a WYSIWYG editor (I use MuseScore). Frescobaldi is a very nice way of getting started. It generates code that you see, you can use buttons for features you don't know yet and then you can type code directly when you know it. Frescobald…

The fact that slurs and grouping must be appended after the note hasn't always been so. I have been a user since its first versions, and at the beginning you would write a legato scale like this:

(c d e f g a b c)

which indeed looks more natural because resembles the way parentheses are used in mathematics and programming.

If I remember correctly, the change happened ~20 years ago because it made the notation more consistent: everything related to the note happens after the note name (durations, staccato, marcato, slurs, etc.). I remember that it took me several months to get acquainted with the new syntax.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#72

Post by briffid »

I developed the most feature-rich editor for Lilypond (as a plugin for jEdit). It had midi, virtual keyboard, integrated pdf viewer, templates, snippets, autocomplete, lots of cool stuff. I also built an on-the-fly syntax checker. However, Lilypond development gradually turned to a direction that made it impossible to create a useful syntax checker. As you could actually change the language itself in your source file, by actually changing the enormous amount of Scheme code that provided the Lilypond features. So at the end one couldn't provide reliable edit time autocomplete or error checking, because they needed to actually run the Lilypond interpreter. So I gave up and switched to MuseScore. I even got time to create scores and learn my instruments :)

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#74

Post by bonzini »

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…

I use it to typeset songs that my son wants to learn on the guitar. I can tailor the difficulty and add some "special" things based on what he's learning, for example customizing chords or changing the key signature.

I also used it to typeset a simple song that I arranged and played at a funeral service. I could have written it by hand, but given I was a bit anxious about the performance it helped to have an extremely readable version.

Writing lilypond source code is about the same difficulty as LaTeX. The midi output helps stomping out mistakes and it's easy to follow the source as it plays. Sheet music is pretty expressive, it's a good balance between showing what to play and how, and lilypond is about 1:1 with sheet music.

That said in lilypond you can add some kind of abstraction through both macros and typesetter settings. For example it can calculate automatically which frets and strings correspond to notes, and generate guitar tablature (fret+string notation) and sheet music from the same source. Also, instead of specifying by hand how to play each note, you can basically tell lilypond "I want the left hand to be roughly here on the fretboard" and that affects the strings it tells the player to pluck.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#75

Post by dang »

croisillon wrote: post #7
dang wrote: post #3

Related. Others? “Compiling” Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30625450 - March 2022 (44 comments) Lyp – The Lilypond Swiss Army Knife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 - Dec 2016 (7 comments) Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 - July 2010 (36 comments) Open source typesetter for sheet music - https:/…

looks like this task could somehow be automated ;)

It would require writing code to pick out the meaningful threads.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#76

Post by xpointer »

In 2009, I made Velato, an esolang where code is written in pitch values (https://github.com/rottytooth/Velato) encoded as MIDI files. So sort of the opposite of writing algorithmic music (where the human programmer writes music to satisfy conditions of the program). Before switching to LilyPond, I'd used GUIDO with a GUIDO-to-MIDI generator, but it was always awkward. Part of the challenge is that notes can be sounded simultaneously to make the score work better musically, but still need to appear in the correct sequence in the MIDI file for the program to succeed; something that LilyPond handles correctly. There's a transparency to how LilyPond functions that is not always there with programs that try to be "helpful" and clean-up or rearrange information.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#77

Post by croisillon »

dang wrote: post #75
croisillon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like this task could somehow be automated ;)

It would require writing code to pick out the meaningful threads.

maybe according to the points and comments they got at the time? i mean yes it would require writing code but lately you do it so often manually...

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#78

Post by Kye »

croisillon wrote: post #77
dang wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would require writing code to pick out the meaningful threads.

maybe according to the points and comments they got at the time? i mean yes it would require writing code but lately you do it so often manually...

Maybe dang enjoys this part of the job and doesn't want to automate it away.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#79

Post by BashiBazouk »

I'm not a musician but have training as a printmaker so I was intrigued by the use of the term "engraved" to put down music on paper. Looks like the early reproduction of sheet music was the intaglio process of engraving the music into a metal plate and reproducing on an intaglio press, that is the ink is in the groves and the surface of the plate is wiped clean.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#80

Post by croisillon »

Kye wrote: post #78
croisillon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe according to the points and comments they got at the time? i mean yes it would require writing code but lately you do it so often manually...

Maybe dang enjoys this part of the job and doesn't want to automate it away.

or maybe it is already automated, we will never know :)
Post reply on HN