While writing this text here, I am trying to remember how I learned lilypond, and what was the information that I was missing the most. So, my typical score will exercise most of the basic features of lilypond, but probably just very few of the advanced ones. For reasons of copyright, I don’t publish these scores. That is, a song absolutely must fit on one page, and you want to see global structure, chords, voice plus perhaps some extra snippets for a typical instrumental or vocal accompaniment, or break. I should add that my application area is writing scores in the style of “real books” (for jazz and rock), to be used in a hobbyist band. Certainly a musician is capable of structured thinking? Music is structure that you can hear. So, the following is my attempt to explain lilypond in a “semantics first” way.Īnd I do think this kind of documentation would serve both groups of users well. We can infer some of the underlying semantics from that, but the description is mixed with implementation detail that a plain “user” does not need. There is a subset of lilypond documentation targeted at programmers that want to extend lilypond. (Of course there are enough under-documented programming languages and libraries out there, but I avoid them.) I find that lilypond docs are lacking in structure and exactness when compared to definitions of general or domain specific programming languages that I usually work with. I am a professional computer scientist and a hobby musician (at best). It seems that the documentation targets (semi) professional musicians that are hobby programmers (at best). I find it difficult to infer from that the underlying principles of the semantics of the language. Most of it consists of examples that show syntax and semantics of individual features. We call it the Rosegarden Codicil : a mildly tongue-in-cheek adoption of the legal term for an addition or supplement that explains, modifies, or revokes a will or part of one (from the Latin codicillus, 'little book').In the words of the authors, “ LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible.” Through the extension of a powerful piece of existing open-source software, the Rosegarden sequencer, a rehearsal aid has been developed which is highly accessible to expert musicians and sufficiently flexible to handle many different microtonal scales. The composer's wish to explore the expressive possibilities of such alternative tuning systems presents new challenges to performers who, even at the highest level, may have limited experience with microtonality. So we have framed our definition as indicated above merely with our present practical purpose in mind. On the other hand, it would seem somewhat eccentric to call the various historical varieties of just and mean-tone tuning with twelve tones or fewer microtonal just because they are different from 12-ET. Scales with seven or eleven equally-spaced steps per octave, for example, could reasonably be considered microtonal. For example, the definition could be so broad as to include all tunings other than the one based on the ubiquitous Western tempered scale with twelve equally-spaced steps per octave (hereinafter abbreviated as 12-ET). We are using the term 'microtonal tuning' here to mean simply any tuning with more than twelve notes per octave, though we realise that the term is sometimes defined more broadly. The subject of this paper is microtonal tuning and a project which has developed several technologically-assisted methods of rehearsing music based on one particular microtonal scale. This project was unorthodox for the following reasons: playing two microtonal scales on one clarinet, appropriating a quasi-octave as interval of equivalency, and composing with non-octave scales. Although there are programs today that can interactively handle microtonal notation, e.g., MaxScore and the Bach library for Max/MSP, we show how a computer can assist composers in navigating poly-microtonal scales or, for advanced composer-theorists, to interpret equal-tempered scales as just intonation frequency ratios situated in a harmonic lattice. Some computer code assisted us during the creation period in managing up to five staves for one line of music: sounding pitch, MIDI keyboard notation for the composer in both BP and alpha, and a clarinet fingering notation for the performer in both BP and alpha. Neither has a 1200 cent octave, however they share an interval of 1170 cents which we attempted to use as a substitute for motivic transposition. In 2012 we collaborated on a solo work for Bohlen–Pierce (BP) clarinet in both the BP scale and Carlos alpha scale.
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