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LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

lilypond.org

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Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#81

Post by vintermann »

Tokkemon wrote: post #63
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 setu…

Even more than precision, you need consistency. You need to tweak the rules, not just the elements, to make a score look good. So WYSIWYG doesn't buy you that much.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#82

Post by araes »

dsubburam wrote: post #66
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, transcription…

> In sheet music, there's no ready equivalent to functions taking arguments and returning values.

Sounds like an interesting idea for a music major somewhere. Plus, with conductor or local condition inputs, might make for entertaining sight reading. If sunny, && morning, play notes this way : If dusk || rain, play this way : play default.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#83

Post by dang »

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...

Comments, yes—but how do you automate which comments are meaningful?

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#84

Post by krapp »

dang wrote: post #83
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...

Comments, yes—but how do you automate which comments are meaningful?

You don't. Arguably, as far as the software is concerned, karma points are a signal for meaning but of course it doesn't work that way in practice. Maybe you could sort by a ratio of upvotes to comments, or recency, obviously leaving flagged threads out, possibly also leaving out threads that can no longer be commented on. But all of that is just sorting by a bad heuristic (karma) with extra steps.

I don't think you should bother trying to find "meaningful" threads at all, since there is no objective definition for that in context, other than "relatedness" to the current thread. I have a browser plugin that does it, it doesn't need to be that deep. Let readers decide what is meaningful to them. You can't automate everything.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#85

Post by Tokkemon »

vintermann wrote: post #81
Tokkemon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 setu…

Even more than precision, you need consistency. You need to tweak the rules, not just the elements, to make a score look good. So WYSIWYG doesn't buy you that much.

Eh, but "rules" only get you so far. There's tons and tons of situations where a human with eyes just needs to make a decision to "make it work." That's where "systems-based" engraving falls apart. It comes with practice and experience of doing the art over and over, and encountering all those little nuances in real scores and figuring out how to solve them.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#86

Post by dirkt »

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 don't know "what type of person uses this" in general, but I use it whenever I need to typeset music, which happens when I need to sing something with others. This includes be re-creating sheet music I have for better readability. I've never done any composing.

* It's not very similar to the source code. Basically you put in note names (c d e f ...) and durations (c4 e8 g8 c2). The rest is commands and markup to deal with the remaining very complex needs music typesetting has. Think Latex for music.

* I've never seen any git repos for that, but there are sites like CPDL and IMSLP that sometimes also include Lilypond source (or other sources).

* "How expressive is sheet music": I guess the easiest way to find out is to actually play an instrument or sing? It's a bit like asking "how expressive is the written word, like books and these things".

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#87

Post by dirkt »

paradox460 wrote: post #60

I've been using LilyPond for ages to typeset music, to the point where I find other tools cumbersome My current workflow is vscode, with a plug-in that handles auto compile and displays a PDF in an editor pane, and handles midi input from a small keyboard I've got next to my desk

Oh, I didn't know there are VSCode plug-ins for Lilypond.

Which one are you using?

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#88

Post by vintermann »

Tokkemon wrote: post #85
vintermann wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more than precision, you need consistency. You need to tweak the rules, not just the elements, to make a score look good. So WYSIWYG doesn't buy you that much.

Eh, but "rules" only get you so far. There's tons and tons of situations where a human with eyes just needs to make a decision to "make it work." That's where "systems-based" engraving falls apart. It comes with practice and experience of doing the art over and over, and encountering all those little nuances in real scores and figuring out how to solve them.

The reason Lilypond is so good is that two people who really, really knew engraving took the time to codify a lot of those rules.

Re: LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

#89

Post by paradox460 »

dirkt wrote: post #87
paradox460 wrote: post #60

I've been using LilyPond for ages to typeset music, to the point where I find other tools cumbersome My current workflow is vscode, with a plug-in that handles auto compile and displays a PDF in an editor pane, and handles midi input from a small keyboard I've got next to my desk

Oh, I didn't know there are VSCode plug-ins for Lilypond. Which one are you using?

I've been using this one:

https://github.com/lhl2617/VSLilyPond

Its a bit old, but works very well. I contributed a few fixes years ago to make the midi more reliable, depending on the type of keyboard you have

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