Friday, February 4, 2011

Guilding the LilyPond

I've just discovered the superb open-source musical typesetting system LilyPond. It's a text-based system, very similar to (and presumably inspired by) the LaTeX system.

Here is a preliminary effort at a transcription using the system:


I can't vouch for the quality of the transcription itself (particularly the timing of the vocal lines), but I think you'd agree the formatting is beautiful. And it only took me a few hours on a Saturday morning --- most of which was one-off learning of the syntax and the various tricks.

The learning curve seems similar to what I experienced with LaTeX: there are plenty of little tricks to learn, most of which can be picked up by looking at snippets in the extensive documentation.

The system also handles guitar TAB and chord box diagrams, so it looks like a perfect solution for all my transcription needs.

The icing on the cake is that, being a text-based system which can be run from the command-line, it will be possible to set up scripts to generate sheet music in an automated fashion. My first project: generate random musical notation of specified complexity to use for sight-reading and sight-singing practice. Something like this has already been done by this guy, who incidentally was kind enough to put me onto LilyPond in the first place.

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