
OMN: Scripting the whole language of traditional staff notation - geoffroy
http://opusmodus.com/omn.html
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z3ugma
Also worth a look is Lilypond
[http://www.lilypond.org/](http://www.lilypond.org/).

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rhizome
Do these really need a separate post? They're already in the existing one.

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colomon
Where? I admit I haven't read the entire thing (as it got boring fast) but a
search on a couple of the pages doesn't turn up the word Lilypond?

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rhizome
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178644)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179371)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179313)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177996)

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a-nikolaev
Just a sidenote that the Opusmodus software is not open source, not free, and
works only on Mac.

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kregasaurusrex
What information does OMN contained that isn't preserved in sheet music
already? I was looking at OCR tools a few months back and found OpenOMR which
expresses the MIDI instruction with all of these properties.

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byteCoder
Looking at their score example at the bottom of the page, the right-hand score
is defined as a separate entity from the left-hand score. As a result, to the
OMN notation reader, it's hard to see the inherent synchrony between the two
hands. This would be a bitch to debug and compose (i.e., code) without its
display on a standard staff, which would show the time-ordered parallelism
directly.

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knz42
There's a conceptual issue with the language and a missing example: what of
chords where one part of the chord is pressed longer than another? Or when one
part must be staccato and another not?

I can't seem to see how this is expressed with OMN.

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DanielBMarkham
It would be easy enough to write a parser for this.

Interesting that they see it as a way to freeform new compositional ideas.

Over the years I've tried a huge selection of music composition software. I've
yet to find something that's both easy and composable. It may be, just like
the CLI/GUI discussion -- plain text may win out over a lot of mousing around
and clicking.

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djfm
Very cool! Looking forward to experiment with it. In the same spirit but less
advanced (my "language" has bugs, I know) I wrote this toy project:
[http://sound-of-ascii.herokuapp.com/](http://sound-of-ascii.herokuapp.com/).
There's a demo and you can play around with it.

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saljam
Does this have notation for quarter tones? I can't find that on their website.

That's always been a pain point for me. No quarter tone notation rules out a
lot, including most of Arabic and Turkish, and much of Greek maqam music.

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colomon
Dunno about OMN, but Lilypond seems to have quarter tone support:
[http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation-
big...](http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation-big-
page.html#accidentals) (third staff down)

