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a 'solution' that dumps even more toxic pollutants into the environment BY DESIGN than nuclear does even in accidents.

It's a pity no such thing as a "scrubber" exists or could ever be attached to any coal-fired power station, ever. No amount of research or engineering could ever improve that technology. It's just not possible.

Nope, the only way forward is to invest the billions of dollars we could have put into a mythical "safe coal" into experimental fast breeder and pebble bed reactors, which are perfectly safe by design and can never have any problems, ever!

Sorry, I meant this new generation of nucler advocates.

ACT Apricot - you can see specs at http://computermuseum.gre.ac.uk/view.php?id=43

[T]his is a classic example of the old military maxim of "amateurs discuss strategy; experts discuss logistics". A "great idea" is only a tactic. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Any fool can come up with a great idea. The real work is successfully marshalling the resources needed to bring the idea to fruition.

Indeed. So how about we propose attacking the major problem: When we're writing code that to us is original, how can we check it against the body of patents to see if there's a match? I'm not talking about us programmers trying to decrypt legalese; I'm talking about a repository of patented code, with a web site that will compare a chunk of submitted code and tell you whether there's a close match.

I've been involved for a while in the comparable problem with music: I'm thinking of a tune that I'd like to play (and perhaps record)? Is it a copyrighted tune? How can I find out whether someone owns the tune, and if so, how do I contact them and ask permission?

I've asked this question to reps of a number of music publishers, and the answer I've got is that I should buy a copy of everything they've published and search through it all for the tune. They apparently are serious about this. There is a slightly better solution in the US: Go to the Library of Congress and spend several years searching through their archives, comparing every piece of music with the tune in your head.

The online search sites aren't much help. There's not much published music online, and what is, is mostly in forms like PDF or Sibelius or other graphical formats. Extracting musical information from this is an intractable problem, and to my knowledge, nobody has even seriously tackled it. MIDI is slightly better, but still intractable for this purpose.

There was a plain-text music notation developed about 15 years ago, and there's a small body of music in this form online. (I hope Chris forgives me for the slashdotting. ;-) It is easily parsed by software and the musical information can be extracted. There is a proposal that an online archive of all known music be created in this form. Some partly-successful software exists for comparing chunks of music in this form and calculating a "distance" between them.

Software can potentially be approached the same way. But it's not trivial. Attempting to handle chunks of code in arbitrary programming languages (including some not invented yet) is not practical; we'd need a way of converting code into an "archive" form in a standard archival language. And that language would have to be sufficiently tractable that such a translation would be feasible (i.e., not PL/I or a primitive Turing machine's code or Intercal or Brainf**k ;-)

It's hard to imagine any commercial vendor cooperating willingly with such an effort. But it could be interesting to think of the impact of, say, a legal proceding that decided that since your claimed patent (or copyright) isn't in the archive, you can't sue someone for a violation. After all, you knowingly withheld the code from programmers who were diligently trying to find your patent and pay you for a license.

It's not clear this can ever work with music, either. 99% of the online music in abc form is the public-domain "trad" stuff, because copyright owners usually don't permit putting their music online in a computer-readable form. But even this little turns out to be useful. We've already seen cases where a publisher sends a C&D letter to someone, claiming to own a tune, and gets the reply "That tune was published by So-and-so in London in 1723. How can you claim to own it?" The publisher slinks off and is never heard from again (until they try the same fraud with someone else).

The bottom line in both cases is that we have no practical way that a creator can determine whether something they've created is legally owned by someone else due to copyright or patent. But we do potentially have solutions to thi

lilypond -m score.ly

As an alternative you can use the ABC format. You can then use abc2ly to convert to Lilypond format and then use the command above to convert to MIDI. Example:

abc2ly score.abc
lilypond -m score.ly

I know you asked for open-source software, but if you are using a Mac or Windows machine you might want to look at Finale Notepad. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.

For simple songs and melodies there are various utilities that use abc music notation.
Here is a page listing them: http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/

This lets you enter music using letters and other utilities will convert it into midi or wav files.

Something similiar and free is the Guido system. It is designed to handle more complicated pieces:
http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/GUIDO/

Another free system is Rosegarden:http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

Here's the introduction:

abc is a language designed to notate tunes in an ascii format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin (such as English, Irish and Scottish) which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation. However, it is extendible to many other types of music and recently Steve Allen has coded Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Movement 2 in abc! Since its introduction at the end of 1991 it has become very popular and there now exist several Windows, Mac, Palmtop and UNIX based tools which can read abc notation and either process it into staff notation or play it through the speakers of a computer.

One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn't of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes. In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email.

ABC is an extremely popular format for collecting and exchanging tunes. There are Large Tune Repositories using ABC. nr

Here's the introduction:

abc is a language designed to notate tunes in an ascii format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin (such as English, Irish and Scottish) which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation. However, it is extendible to many other types of music and recently Steve Allen has coded Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Movement 2 in abc! Since its introduction at the end of 1991 it has become very popular and there now exist several Windows, Mac, Palmtop and UNIX based tools which can read abc notation and either process it into staff notation or play it through the speakers of a computer.

One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn't of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes. In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email.

ABC is an extremely popular format for collecting and exchanging tunes. There are Large Tune Repositories [norbeck.nu] and Tune Search Engines [mit.edu] using ABC. cm

Here's the introduction:

abc is a language designed to notate tunes in an ascii format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin (such as English, Irish and Scottish) which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation. However, it is extendible to many other types of music and recently Steve Allen has coded Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Movement 2 in abc! Since its introduction at the end of 1991 it has become very popular and there now exist several Windows, Mac, Palmtop and UNIX based tools which can read abc notation and either process it into staff notation or play it through the speakers of a computer.

One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn't of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes. In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email.

ABC is an extremely popular format for collecting and exchanging tunes. There are Large Tune Repositories and Tune Search Engines using ABC.

Intuitive maybe, but painfully slow. Imagine having to type a paper using your mouse.

I use ABC notation to notate tunes, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet. When I get a tune in my head, I can just type it in quickly, and convert it to sheet music or MIDI on the command line. I don't need any special software to write the music, beyond vi.

Another nice property of ABC notation: you don't have to pass it through software before you can read it. Because it mimics a staff line using ASCII characters, ABC is readable enough that some musicians can sight-read an ABC as well as sheet music. People commonly use the notation in trad music mailing lists or Usenet posts, which is another good reason to have a good plain-text notation for notating melodies.

ABC versus Lilypond: ABC notation is intended for notating melodies (e.g., folk melodies) rather than arbitrary polyphonic music, It is a file format designed to do one specific thing very well, without being extended into something cumbersome but general-purpose.

Xcott

I want to use my MIDI keyboard for entry

Try the following:

• Hans Lub's emacs/MIDI input mode
• Nicholas Sceaux' Emacs/MIDI input mode
• RUMOR a command line monophonic MIDI/lilypond entry tool.
• LilyComp a graphic entry tool, for those that don't read music well.

I don't want to learn another syntax. Now what?

There are other options: it is possible to create the music in another format. Supported formats include

• MIDI: LilyPond includes midi2ly, a program that translates a MIDI file to LilyPond.
• ETF: LilyPond includes etf2ly, a convertor for the Finale ETF format (about ETF)
• ABC: LilyPond includes abc2ly, a convertor for the popular ABC format (about ABC)
• MusicXML. Guido Amoruso's xml2ly will convert MusicXML to LilyPond. (About MusicXML.).

There already is a fairly widespread musical notation format in use on the web. It's called ABC. There's even a Sourceforge site for it.

That said, ABC isn't perfect - it's evolved in many ambiguous and incompatible ways over the years, making it difficult to code a common parser. MusicXML might be better suited for that job, or for professional use.

For casual use, though, ABC is tough to beat.

and this all reminds me of humanity's direction towards isolation The Machine Stops

This one ?

http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~cs39/playpong.html

Hmmm, is it just me? Am I the only one on /. following contemporary art?

Douglas Gordon made a name for himself some time back with "24-Hour Psycho," which was a video projection of the famous Hitchcock film, with the sound off, and playing at such a rate that it would finish in 24 hours.

I saw it in London, and it was really fascinating (for a few minutes anyway). But since the exhibition wasn't open 24 hours at a time, I couldn't authenticate the work.... I guess that's what art critics are for.

Anyway, here's an excellent parody.

What I'm doing at the moment is using ABC for the data entry. This is because I can touch type this. There are attempts to provide GUI's for ABC, none of which is yet really usable for my purposes. However, there is a lot of really good command line based software that runs fast enough for me.

Then when I have what I want, I use the abc2ly converter that comes with lilypond to do the actual typesetting. This is also software that has a long way to go. It's in python, and I found I was able to add things to it when it didn't have a feature I wanted, so by now it's pretty good for my purposes. One of the features I added was an ability to put lilypond directives as comments in the ABC, so I keep the ABC as the "source" form for my music.

You can see the final result of this process by looking at dowland.pdf , and the ABC sources are on my Music publishing page.

When I started LilyPond, I felt that there had to be a good justification for the existence of LilyPond, so I wrote a little document about a PD sheet-music archive to be called "Mutopia". Some years later, we had gathered too many test-scores in the lilypond package, and decided to host them in a separate archive. I called for volunteers to set this up. Chris Sawer (to whom I owe a big thanks!) made the site that's featured in this article.

Of course, I wanted the files to be usable with free-software, so using Sibelius or Finale was out of the question. There are some other options, like the ABC format, but they have more technical limitations.

Anyway, LilyPond format is flexible (I wrote several convertors to it, among others a Finale to .ly convertor) and Lily also dumps the output as a nicely quantized MIDI file, which is rather easy to import into other programs.

When it comes to music representation there aren't any good published standards: the problem with NIFF is not that it is binary per se, but rather that it is quite limited, and has a tendency to glue together musical and graphical information into a big blob. Also, there aren't any free score editors that support NIFF.

As for SMDL, I don't think that there exists any software that can meaningfully handle SMDL.

While originally created to notate traditional (i.e. Irish, Scottish, Bretton, etc) music using simple ASCII text, the standard now supports some pretty complex notation. In fact there is a version of Beethoven's Symphony No.7, Movement 2 by Steve Allen.

Most of the ABC interpreters out there are GPL'd (including abc2ps, the ABC to Postscript Converter) and there are apps ou there for just about every platform (including a java based interpreter for embedding in you web pages). There are also a couple converters to or from MIDI, and a few apps that get a little fancier (add harmonies, etc). See the ABC Homepage for a complete list of software and music available.

Anyway I'm done ranting....just wanted to see my favorite notation system get some air time. :}

While originally created to notate traditional (i.e. Irish, Scottish, Bretton, etc) music using simple ASCII text, the standard now supports some pretty complex notation. In fact there is a version of Beethoven's Symphony No.7, Movement 2 by Steve Allen.

Most of the ABC interpreters out there are GPL'd (including abc2ps, the ABC to Postscript Converter) and there are apps ou there for just about every platform (including a java based interpreter for embedding in you web pages). There are also a couple converters to or from MIDI, and a few apps that get a little fancier (add harmonies, etc). See the ABC Homepage for a complete list of software and music available.

Anyway I'm done ranting....just wanted to see my favorite notation system get some air time. :}