
Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? - b-man
http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/big-page
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anigbrowl
This is well worth reading for any developer once you get past the first page
or so. At first the complaints about existing software seem overblown because
it's not obvious where the shortcomings are, but once you get into it it's an
interesting study in how multiple small flaws can be seriously aggravating to
the trained eye...and the dangers of unthinking abstraction that works fine in
simple cases but falls apart when applied to more complex problems.

~~~
akadruid
I can barely see the difference even after the explanation; but it's a
beautiful thing to watch perfectionists creating a truly great tool, and
making it free. They really are making the world a better place.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>I can barely see the difference even after the explanation;

I'm only barely trained at piano - the handmade notation does look better to
me, but I couldn't actually tell you why. Indeed my impression of the first
close-ups was that they were pretty near identical, yet I couldn't get over
the sense that one was richer, fuller. It would have been nice to have a blind
study to open on - choose which of these x is the nicest rendered, state your
musical training, then tell us why we like what we did.

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zb
_Since typography relies on human judgement of appearance, people cannot be
replaced. However, much of their dull work can be automated: if LilyPond
solves most of the common situations correctly, then this will be a huge
improvement over existing software. The remaining cases can be tuned by hand._

This is the thing that we so often forget: algorithms can take us a long way,
but they can never completely replace judgement. Everybody should read this
article, even if they couldn't care less about music notation. (I also
particularly enjoyed the section on how not to design software.)

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tel
The care for detail here is overwhelming. Even if you care nothing at all
about the content, it's a strong example of what can be achieved by striving
for perfection.

I also find it interesting they turned to an algorithm similar to Knuth's TeX
algorithm. "Minimizing ugliness" is a pretty potent computational metaphor for
how detail oriented design work works, it seems.

~~~
alextp
It goes further than that, and most modern machine learning methods are
fundamentally defined in a "minimizing ugliness" framework.

~~~
tel
Well, yeah, but the metaphor is what I think is interesting. It's technically
nothing more than shifting from a deterministic to a statistical model, but
the idea of applying statistical algorithms to many aspects where computers
need to emulate human design is a powerful heuristic.

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zweiterlinde
I've been dying for the inverse of lilypond;an app that would allow you to
take a picture and turn it into text notation/MIDI would be awesome.

That said, I used lilypond a couple of years ago and loved it.

~~~
hnote
There is an open source Audiveris <http://audiveris.kenai.com/> (link
currently down, cache at <http://bit.ly/99yvbm>) and commercial SmartScore
<http://www.musitek.com/smartscre.html> (400$)

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RK
I have only fired up lilypond a couple of times, but I have to say I am very
impressed by this open source project. It obviously aims to be best in
category.

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cabalamat
One sentence that struck me was "Notation is an intricate symbolic diagramming
language for visualizing an often much simpler musical concept."

Now if you remove the word "musical", it's true of notation in general. Any
notation should reflect the structure of the thing it is notating; if music
notation is typically more complex than the "often much simpler musical
concept" then I would say musical notation is broken and should be changed.

Is musical notation broken? I've no idea, I don't know enough about it to say.

~~~
cwfreeman
From their point of view, it is much more complex than any given musical
concept because it has to encode such a wide variety of musical concepts. The
musician playing it doesn't (intentionally) pay attention to the complexities
that Lilypad is talking about. (I've never noticed stem lengths or stem
directions when playing, but they're important to keep things legible.)

It's comparable to fonts: the study of fonts is pretty intricate, regardless
of whether you're writing a grocery list or "One Hundred Years Of Solitude".

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mjcohen
This reminded me very much of the great effort that Knuth (as a commenter
mentioned) put into both his monumental TeX formatting system and MetaFont
font generation program in a (imho) successful attempt to enable the
preparation of beautiful math documents.

One thing that made TeX so successful is that it was designed to be open, and
many packages (e.g., LaTeX) have been written to made it easier to use and
more powerful. If LilyPond can be easily extended in the same way (i.e.,
programed in LilyPond, not C++), it might be similarly influential.

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socksy
I find it interesting they refer to notes as quarter values or eighths. I can
quickly see myself getting confused by that (is that a quaver? Did I do it
right?) - does it change if you change the time signature from 4/4 to 3/4?
(forgive the slashes)

~~~
aaronkaplan
"Quarter note," "eighth note" etc. are the standard terms in US English. What
you call a quaver, we call an eighth note, regardless of time signature. (4/4
time means there are 4 quarter notes in a measure; 3/4 means there are 3
quarter notes.)

~~~
socksy
Thanks, that explains it, though it does seem somewhat odd to my UK based
musical training, where we regard a crotchet as a whole note...

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ssp
It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so
that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.

~~~
ptomato
It's open source. Knock yourself out.

~~~
ssp
When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting
it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be
editing text files.

~~~
alextp
Another problem is that lilypond is slow, and any WYSIWYG interface to it
would either bypass the compiler to show a "preview" of the score or would
have a horrible lag whenever the user edited something. This might not be
obvious, but adding or removing (or even changing the pitch/duration of) a
single note can potentially lead to a solution with completely different
appearance (after all it's a dynamic programming algorithm that lays things
out, considering all sorts of "badness" in the style of tex). If you remove
this specificity for some greedy techniques, then it will no longer have
lilypond's quality.

~~~
BrandonM
The performance would depend on how you interface with the library. I envision
a setup where the entire piece is first written using a nice interface, that
frontend then generates the text file that is passed to Lilypond, Lilypond
does its magic (one time!), and then the user has an opportunity to make minor
tweaks to the layout or start the cycle anew to fix mistakes.

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danbmil99
Meh, I was writing out scores for a band; when I started using Finale the
musicians thanked me profusely for making it readable.

Unless you can afford your own personal copyist, it's sort of irrelevant. The
little formatting nits you learn to work around (or just talk the musicians
through it with pencils, which you end up doing anyway for musical reasons)

~~~
BrandonM
Are you saying that Lilypond is not worthwhile? I don't understand the point
of this comment. Or did you just not read the entire article?

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jewbacca
It's written in Scheme. Awesome.

