“Compiling” Music

136 points by franek 4 years ago | 44 comments

pdpi 4 years ago |

As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs.

My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet music. She used one of the point-and-click scorewriters for a while (Sibelius maybe?) and was thorough displeased with both the output quality and the editing process itself. After some poking and prodding, and getting her to overcome the "but it's writing code!" barrier, she fell in love with how productive it is and still uses it, some 15 years later. It was pretty interesting to see somebody with no exposure to the software world develop their own habits and code style.

franek 4 years ago | |

> As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs.

This deep care is documented in the "Essay on automated music engraving" in the Lilypond docs:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/essay-big-page.h...

Previously discussed (I guess -- different title and dead link):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262

cesaref 4 years ago | |

My wife writes choral music with Sibelius.

One of the problems she has is versioning, and it's pretty obvious that something like LilyPond + source control would be a massive benefit to her for managing the creative process, as pieces are rehearsed and modified/corrected it turns into a versioning problem with various performers unsure which copy of the piece they are working from.

I should really look into this, especially what printing support looks like (she typically prints double sided on A3 so that it folds correctly into a music folder), and what support for playback looks like.

It's a pretty cool project, I really have been meaning to investigate it, so maybe it's time to pull down a copy and kick the tyres.

ramses0 4 years ago | | |

Minimally you can look at the pdf tools / toolkit and "imposition".

Basically, Lilypond has like a zillion different output formats and page sizes:

https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/paper-...

...then you can take one or more *.pdf as a linear set of sheets and run it through some imposition (booklet) tooling.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/465271/gluing-imposition...

https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

https://pypi.org/project/pdfimpose/

It wouldn't be terribly hard to whip up a Makefile and/or a few shell scripts which would "do the right thing" 99.9% of the time.

eg:

build.sh => make && xdg-open ./output.pdf

commit.sh => git add -u * && git commit -m '$DATE' && git push origin

add-new-files.sh => git add * && git commit -m '$DATE - new files' && git push origin || notify-send "HEELLLPP!"

booklet.sh => make && pdfimpose $OPTIONS ./output.pdf -o booklet.pdf && xdg-open ./booklet.pdf

Good Luck, Have Fun! :-)

TylerE 4 years ago | | |

This is fairly trivially handled. All the commercial packages easily allow putting a last modification time stamp on the page footer, or something like that.

jfk13 4 years ago | |

My wife is also a musician and music teacher, but I have not been able to persuade her to tackle Lilypond. (I have occasionally done projects in Lilypond for her, and the results are great, but the barrier to entry is too high for her to scale.)

What she has found much more approachable is MuseScore (https://musescore.org/). I haven't done a careful comparison of the output to see which scores better [sorry!], but it's certainly adequate for her everyday needs, and with a cheap midi keyboard as input device, it was remarkably easy to get started.

tasty_freeze 4 years ago | | |

Musescore is usable but isn't great. I haven't used lilypond, but I'm sure lilypond is miles better.

The focus of musescore has changed over the past year or two, all triggered by a funny youtube sh*tpost criticizing its UI (it was one series of such videos taking shots at all the big notation programs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

The guy who created it is a trifecta: a composer, a typographer, and UI expert. The team at musescore took the criticism in good humor, and hired the creator of the video (Tantacrul, aka Martin Keary) to help them change it. The first phase was getting rid of some low-hanging fruit in the UI department. That work is ongoing.

The main focus of the next phase (musescore 4.0) is the quality of the layout. Some of those improvements already landed in musescore 3.6.

jancsika 4 years ago | |

> As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors

tldr; Lilypond needs to compile a perfect engraving. If it does then you get a great looking score for the least effort. If it doesn't then you'll likely eat all your time tweaking. This makes it good for single instrument parts, not so good for more complex scores.

It's at least an order of magnitude more difficult to tweak anything in Lilypond than it is with a WYSIWYG editor.

Moreover, with WYSIWYG you can take a 30 minute class offered by an expert who will show you how to change the defaults to get a decent-looking score. Even moreover, that expert could literally sit in front of your laptop and drag an indication to a better spot to teach you something about whitespace/alignment/etc.

If you can figure out how to make a small tweak to a Lilypond score in less than 10 minutes you're doing well. And you'll probably have to recompile at least twice since you'll estimate the distance of the tweak wrong, especially if you're a new user. For each tweak.

Oh, and recompilation time scales with score length. Good luck changing the position of an indication in the last bar right before a deadline. I think I'd rather track down an XHTML error in a tax form than do that.

TylerE 4 years ago | |

Not quite as true anymore, as Dorico can produce output that is AT LEAST as good.

bsedlm 4 years ago | | |

going way off the rail (but this is a good example for some general thoughs regardings to software in society)

this illustrates two different approaches (goals? paths?) about software in society:

on the one hand: the lilypond way -- the old-school hobbyist open/free source "communist" approach, the path-being-abandonded. In which there's a learning curve but once learned it opens a world of possibilities.

on the other hand: the dorico way -- the commercialist (mercantilist), Microsoft-pionered world of private and commercial software products in which companies work to reduce the learning curve but also end up turning the afore mentioned world of possibilities into a constrained hallway or a boxed easy-to-use shelf of products (an app store) which is also difficult to customize (enter the 'contractors ecosystem' who will do it for you; or app marketplace).

The path we're being dragged into (at least I feel like I'm getting dragged, I prefer the other path but this is a collective decision, so my own individual choice is discarded in the face of the overall social choice)

throw0101a 4 years ago | |

Is there a LyX-like tool for music: enter data in a GUI, but a 'code' file is saved and output is generated in the background?

zozbot234 4 years ago | | |

There are some tools along these lines, but most people simply use Frescobaldi as an integrated editing environment for Lilypond. The most GUI-like tools (including Musescore) are based on MusicXML which is intended as a semantic representation of sheet music, usable for more than typesetting; unfortunately, there isn't good interoperability between Lilypond and MusicXML right now, only some hacked-together attempts at basic import and export.

franek 4 years ago | | |

I haven't seriously tried any of them, but have a look a the list at:

http://lilypond.org/easier-editing.html

Maybe Denemo: http://denemo.org/

flyinghamster 4 years ago |

If creating your scores in vimacs and then typing "make" isn't your cup of tea, there's Frescobaldi, essentially an IDE for Lilypond.

https://frescobaldi.org/

dang 4 years ago |

Lyp – The Lilypond Swiss Army Knife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 - Dec 2016 (7 comments)

LilyBin, an Online Musical Score Editor (using LilyPond) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414004 - April 2015 (1 comment)

Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 - July 2010 (36 comments)

Open source typesetter for sheet music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192289 - March 2010 (23 comments)

LilyPond architecture (music notation software in Lisp) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379234 - Nov 2008 (2 comments)

username223 4 years ago |

I'm happy to be reminded that Lilypond is still around. I used it to produce scores (and MIDIs) 15+ years ago, because it offered the same experience as LaTeX -- beautiful results if you're willing to code and, occasionally, battle eldritch horrors beneath its surface. Like (La)TeX and Emacs, I hope it becomes one of those rare pieces of software that lasts longer than a human lifetime. Few things we build these days, not just software, endure so long.

Shugyousha 4 years ago |

I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw this. I always thought that lilypond was a WYSWYG for music sheets but it turned out that it's more a LaTex for music sheets which is what I prefer for typesetting text.

aidenn0 4 years ago |

I love lilypond. My son plays the piano now and I make simplified arrangements of songs for him. He can pick out songs by ear and I'm teaching him to hand annotate first, because I don't know a better way to encourage familiarity with the notation, but I'll get him set up with lilypond eventually.

There are various nicer IDEs for it, but I just run side-by-side windows with zathura and emacs; zathura will automatically reload when PDFs change on disk so I can see my changes immediately.

tunesmith 4 years ago |

Lilypond is freaking awesome. As a hobbyist with a music degree but unrelated career, I switched a while back, and it's saved me multiple times over just because of backwards compatibility and free software. My old version of Sibelius doesn't run on newer hardware, so some old scores I never ported are lost if I don't spend money just to export. But my old lilypond scores will always be fine.

andrewzah 4 years ago |

I'm greatly thankful for the hard work put into lilypond and frescobaldi.

I use lilypond to type up leadsheets for jazz and some other genres [0], inspired by Mark Veltzer's Openbook [1]. I've gotten pretty fast at typing up songs over time. The goal is to have a CLI or web interface to generate a pdf for concert/bb/bass clef/etc, optionally include lyrics/QR codes, and so on.

Being able to transpose is quite handy, although I'm working on a system to automatically handle larger transpositions (e.g. for Eb instruments or for bass clef). The problem is if I statically pick one direction (up or down), some leadsheets will have the notes too high or low. I think I can resolve it with having all songs entered in absolute pitches and scanning for the lowest/highest note.

0: https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev

1: https://github.com/veltzer/openbook

beepbooptheory 4 years ago |

Lilypond also has a guile API, and if you are not interested in the actual notation generation or at least how it looks, it can make some pretty weird and cool midi files. You can turn it into a kind of makeshift lisp Supercollider pattern generator.

agentwiggles 4 years ago | |

That is really cool, I had a ton of fun playing with Overtone a few years ago (Clojure Supercollider wrapper).

There's also Impromptu, which I think is Scheme... There's an incredibly cool talk by Andrew Sorensen using it: https://youtu.be/yY1FSsUV-8c

sramsay 4 years ago | |

Can you say a bit more about this? I know I can go look at the API, but I had no idea that it was capable of generating (?) MIDI files (I don't have cause to use Lilypond, really). Do you personally use it for generative music? Or something adjacent to that?

recursive 4 years ago |

More like compiling music notation, even though this is the original title.

klyrs 4 years ago | |

In addition to the music engraver, you can also use lilypond to generate midi scores.

lelandfe 4 years ago |

One of my family members is a music theory professor, here's what they had to say about this:

> [Lilypond] was one of a handful of early programs turning notation into ASCII text. Older program but still useful. MusicXML has made a lot of these older systems less productive these days, though: https://www.musicxml.com/

> Developed by Michael Goode at Stanford – it's now the international standard for music encoding.

nlake906 4 years ago |

Interesting. Looks very similar to CSound score notation, with CSound being oriented towards rendering audio files, rather than printable documents. CSound is also FOSS, and has a sound generation side that is incredibly deep and detailed.

https://csound.com/

Aidevah 4 years ago |

I've been using Lilypond for a number of years now and it's a truly remarkable piece of software. The quality of the engraving is extremely high, the amount of customization you can carry out is unrivalled, and it is also incredibly versatile. Out of the box it supports stuff ranging from Guitar and lute tablature[1] and notation specific to percussion[2] to modern chord names[3] and Baroque figured bass [4]. Did you know you can also use it to typeset neumes for Gregorian chant[5] and mensural notation[6]?

Nevertheless I should mention that Lilypond serves a different purpose and is aimed at a different audience when compared to popular scorewriters such as musescore. It is primarily an engraver and should be used to typeset existing music, composing directly into it is always going to be very awkward compared to WYSIWYG editors or even just manuscript paper. The learning curve is also quite large and you must be ready to constantly refer back to its (very well written) documentation. But like any complex tool, acquiring familiarity with it is very rewarding in the long run.

[1] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-...

[2] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-...

[3] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/display...

[4] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/figured...

[5] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset...

[6] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset...

samfriedman 4 years ago |

Lilypond helped me learn a lot of music theory I had missed in my learning to play piano; I use it to transcribe music now and it’s a fantastic piece of software (with fantastic docs!)

roddux 4 years ago |

LaTeX for music? nice!

BeFlatXIII 4 years ago | |

I came to LaTeX the other way around: Lilypond for text? Sign me up!

softwarebeware 4 years ago |

Good thing "compiling" is in quotes. I don't think it actually meets the definition. It's more like "encoding."

Aaargh20318 4 years ago |

Anyone else disappointed this is not about music meant to be played while compiling code ?

franek 4 years ago | |

The title is indeed ambiguous. It could just as well refer to sound-coding systems/languages like Sonic Pi, or to what you imagined. (Which would be an oddly specific kind of music, but cool! The operation of a compiler turned into music, somehow?)

That said, I am not disappointed. But then I am also the one who posted this link in the first place. I started using Lilypond last year for transcribing the melody voices from complex sheet music and automatically transposing them into different keys when needed (which is immensely useful). Just recently I discovered that it can also generate MIDI output, so in addition to having a convenient tool to get beautiful sheet music in whatever key I need, I can now easily have my computer play the melodies and memorise them by listening (which for me, on my current instrument, is much easier than playing from notes directly).

ciroduran 4 years ago | |

That's what https://musicforprogramming.net/ is for