

Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas - brolewis
http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/05/music-notation-with-html5-canvas.html

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jazzychad
You may want to look into the Lilypond syntax for textual score notation. -
<http://lilypond.org/>

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nitrogen
Lilypond's web site could benefit from some examples of its output directly on
the front page. I tried three different approaches in my casual attempt to see
just how good it is, and didn't reach any PDFs or printouts.

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jazzychad
Yes, examples and docs are a bit buried, but there is a huge amount of info to
be found.

Example outputs - <http://lilypond.org/switch/tour>

Example syntax - <http://lilypond.org/switch/howto>

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leviathant
Oh man, music notation on a computer is a path you don't want to start down.
Take the oldest, crustiest, hacked together duct-taped programming language
you can think of -- imagine what that language would be like if it would be
still in use hundreds of years from now. That's music notation, today.

Even the really good programs like Sibelius (and I guess Finale...) still have
a ways to go in terms of accurate notation. Attempting to reduce notation to a
JSON-style dataset seems, well, extraordinarily challenging.

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aston
Isn't the majority of the challenge in nice notation similar to typesetting
with text? The difficulty is in making it look nice, not knowing what data
you're attempting to display.

I should think you could encode pitches, start times and durations in a JSON-
style format without many problems.

~~~
skybrian
You could start out that way and get pretty far, but eventually the language
will get complicated enough that you'll want something more like LaTex than
like JSON if you want it to be readable.

Musical notation is often deliberately ambiguous to allow for interpretation.
Tempo is often approximate. Durations are often approximate or implied (such
as swing time). Volume is very approximate. And then there are various kinds
of hinting. The hints need to be in the source code because nobody wants to
specify them with more precision.

But that said, I'd be perfectly happy with something basic that runs in a
browser.

~~~
tjr
For some arenas of music, such as jazz combo-oriented groups, a very basic
melody lead sheet with chords and song structure elements (section a, section
b, repeat, etc.) is plenty.

Maybe rather than focusing on building a full music notation system for the
web, focusing on making something for lead sheets / rhythm charts / etc would
be a better path. I really don't like breaking out Finale to do jazz rhythm
charts, but right now it's just about the best option. Make something better,
and I for one would pay for it.

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thefool
If the goal is to build a wysiwyg editor, finale and others have some
implementation that regular musicians have learned to work with.

For a lot of people, the ability to do midi input is really important because
when they write the music down a lot of the time they have to transcribe from
their motions anyway. This is possibly more important than the actual explicit
way that you write things down.

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hexis
With MathML in the new Firefox engine and now music notation in canvas,
browsers are going to be a bit more fun and beautiful.

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cellshade
Is there a link to the unminimized source for this? Looks awesome!

