Linuxmusician.com Interviews LilyPond Authors

jcn writes "Chris Cannam talks to the authors of one of the best-known and most ambitious music programs for Linux, the LilyPond score engraving system. Unlike other typesetting software like Finale or Sibelius, LilyPond is not a score editor, it aims to use simple textual description of the music and turn it into the highest possible quality output, automatically. Han-Wen says: In my opinion, any file format that claims to be universal should have two properties: it should have an expressive structure, so other formats can be expressed in it, and it should be as lean as possible, so that converting from other formats amounts to removing information. I think that MusicXML fits neither. Ouch."

Comments

Re:Market choice

[Osty]

While I'm not completely familiar with Lilypond, from what I understand it's not trying to be the full, end-to-end solution for music typesetting. It's trying to solve the problem of how you can easily represent musical notation in a textual format and get it to print out into a format as close to human engraving as possible. In otherwords, think of it as TeX for music.

Just as there are GUI frontends for TeX (LyX, for instance), it's completely possible to write a GUI frontend for Lilypond. There are already several projects that might fit the bill on Freshmeat, and I'd be willing to bet that there are several more over at SourceForge (whether or not any of them actually make it past the pre-alpha stage is anybody's guess).

Re:Market choice

[Michael Duggan]

Anyone know of a GUI frontend to Lilypond?

NoteEdit purports to export to Lilypond format.

Re:Market choice

[nanowyatt]

Denemo

Re:Market choice

[merphant]

Chris Cannam, the interviewer in the article, is one of the principal authors of Rosegarden, a free sequencer and music notation editor that runs on Linux. It can output to both Lilypond and MusicXML, among other formats.

Some have the wrong idea

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not meant to replace a score editor!!!

Analogous to the world of word processing, this software is more in the category of software like TeX, LaTeX, or even Postscript and PDF, to a lesser extent. This is software made for pretty printing music. It is meant to do this job, and this job alone very, very well. While one could edit it directly (it's not that difficult to work with), that would be something like using a flathead screwdriver on a screw that is clearly a Philips.

What people should do is look for a score editor that can export LilyPond documents. I'll help start you off:

• NoteEdit
• Gscore
• Roudoudou
• Denemo

I'm sure there are others out there.

Re:Why is it

[robbyjo]

You can see their howto pages to see it in action. You probably want to check out some sample outputs. And this project also uses LilyPond. Check that out.

Re:Market choice

[phliar]

I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way

You might want to distinguish between composing and typesetting. Nothing beats manuscript paper and pen for composing. As Han-Wen says,

Even in the age of computers, classical composers still write music by scribbling stacks of note-paper full with ideas and fragments, and piecing those bits together to a full score. It's a very laborious process, but computers cannot give them the same overview as a bunch of paper fragments spread out over a desk would do.

Lilypond is a typesetting system. The composer sends the completed music to the typesetter/engraver who makes it look nice.

I have a lot of music that's hard to read, or scribbled on some paper, or whatever. Transcribing music into the computer is so much easier with Lilypond that with WYSIWYG programs! My hands stay on the keyboard, I look at the music and type

\time 4/4
\key g\major
\tempo 4=140 % metronome marking
g2\pp \< c8 r8 b4 \! % G half note pp and crescendo to
g2\ff( a4 b4) % G half note ff. The G and quarter notes A and B are slurred
...

On a WYSIWYG system, think about all the mousing and clicking to select and place key and time signatures, metronome marking, three different note durations, a crescendo, a slur, and dynamics. (The percent sign introduces a comment.) Placing an accent on a note? That's just a character. Repeats? That's one word volta. And so on.

Re:What's in a word ?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

While the printed output is asthetically pleasing, it strikes me as an odd technology to persue, because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music. I'd wager the vast majority of rock musicians can't, and that roughly half of pop musicans can't. I can't, and I've written "plenty" of material and play several instruments.

Thanks to strong middle and high school music programs, more people can read music today than ever before.

Reading music is still simply the fastest way for an experienced musician to learn a new piece of music. Many jazz and classical musicians (including myself) can sightread (play it while reading it for the first time) quite complicated pieces of music, up to tempo, which is an extremely valuable skill.

Of course there are a small minority of successful recording artists who can't read music, but the vast majority of successful musicians do read music, and most of them read music well. I don't see this changing anytime soon.

Advantages of Lilypond

[hlub]

As a professional musician I use lilypond a lot. Apart from the
excellent output quality, lilypond has a couple of advantages that
haven't been mentioned in the discussion so far:

• Producing text mixed with music examples (large ones between paragraphs, tiny ones in-line) is tiresome with traditional music notation packages, involving a lot of copying and pasting between notation and text processing programs. Lilypond-book makes this easy (there is only one source file that contains both text and music) An example: source and output.
• Automated production of different output files from one source file is easy (using a script or a makefile). I routinely produce a violin and a viola version of all my teaching materials. Whenever I change something, it is automatically re-done in both versions.
• Even on a simple PDA one can create a lilypond file (all you need is a text editor and a few kB of memory). I am often away from home and I do a lot of my notation this way, in trains and between rehearsals.

Yes, it was a fair bit of work to set it all up (I even use m4 which may not be everyones cup of tea) But after that, producing a new piece of sheet music is really much faster and easier than with the traditional notation packages, and the result is a lot better.

Re:LilyPond is aimed at a small target market

[TheRaven64]

LilyPond, by itself, is only of use to professional engravers, and only those who are willing to learn how to use it.

I'm not sure about that. I sing in a choir in my spare time, and we have a collection of sheet music scrawled by previous conductors which is barely readable (it's hard enough to read to prevent people from being able to sight-sing it, for example). I occasionally typeset these using LilyPond. I am by no means a professional engraver, and it only took a couple of hours to learn LilyPond (less time than it took to learn LaTeX, for example. In fact, LilyPond was the thing that convinced me that learning LaTeX was worth doing).

ABC Notation

[smcdow]

The ABC Notation is very popular amongst tradtional music enthusiasts. It's the format of choice for emailing and exchanging tunes on tradional music mailing lists and newsgroups. ABC is in widespread use.

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.

(Emphasis mine.)

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

GUIDO NoteServer

[whovian]

Congrats to lily's developers for all their hard work.

I just stumbled across this online music composition generator.I wonder Jan and Han-Wen are aware? Looks interesting for quick and dirty snippets, perhaps great for a beginner's music comp class. It also appears that GUIDO has a more "natural" TeX-like command set, things like \slur, \staccato. But judging by the examples, I think lily is a bit more versatile, in the end.