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Linuxmusician.com Interviews LilyPond Authors

Posted by michael on from the every-good-boy-does-fine dept.

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."

4 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Seperation of content and presentation by after · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A good example of seperating content from presentation is to use an XML-type file (at least have a structured document model) where the music data is defined. Then, have somthing like an XLS sound stylesheet to define how the data will sound like. As a developer, this would create greater posibilities what I could do with the sound that my application processes.

    On a side noce GNoise is a good sound editor that I recommend to anyone doing edeting or large sounds like game-music (that is uncompressed in raw format.)

    1. Re:Seperation of content and presentation by merphant · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have been learning Lilypond lately to typeset a complex piano score (Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody#2). One of the things that struck me is that is that writing Lilypond code is a lot like writing XHTML, except the syntax is different. The syntax lets you group your score into smaller chunks pretty much any way you like. Lilypond uses Scheme (via GUILE) similar you would use CSS to define and alter the default layout. Since Scheme is a programming language, you can also use it to generate content like you would with JavaScript, PHP, etc. It seems that

  2. Re:What's in a word ? by Anonymovs+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music

    All of them.

    Dave Brubeck can't. Django Reinhardt couldn't. Paco de Lucia can't (he learned the notation when he wanted to record Falla's classical pieces and Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, but it was laborious). Not all musicians need to know to read music, and not all musical cultures use western notation even when they write music (eg, India).

  3. Re:Counter point by beanyk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hear, hear.

    I used Word 2.0 to type up my Master's thesis, which being Physics, had *lots* of equations. Equation Editor was hell. And my Math grad friends were using this thing called LaTeX for theirs, and it intimidated the hell out of me. Now I'm typing up my PhD, and LaTeX is a godsend.

    Having something similar for musical scores is cool -- just one or two minor projects I have in mind.