Yet another simplified notation - an update one year later

[stuar...@gmail.com]

It's been a year since my first and only post on this forum wherein I described my design for yet another alternative notation (AN).  It's aimed at beginning students of music (piano players in particular) who may later want to learn traditional notation (TN).  It's called What You See Is What You Play, or WYSIWYP ("wizee wip").  And despite it landing with a resounding thud on this forum, herein I will discuss the progress on this project to date as well as what's next on the agenda.  I'm doing so because regardless of the success, or lack thereof, of my own AN, I think elements of my roll-out plan may be relevant to that of all competing ANs.     

Update on the project

To me, the availability of sheet music is a prerequisite for the success of an AN.  As far as I am aware, Klavarskribo is the only AN that has a significant inventory of sheet music (for sale and downloadable as PDF files).  Without a significant inventory, I firmly believe a screen device display app is essential for presenting any AN as virtual sheet music.  Even with Klavarskribo's inventory, they appear to agree since they also provide an app that accepts both midi and MusicXML files as inputs.  It's my view that the MusicXML format should be the standard for any app since it includes all of the elements needed for a complete notation.  However, I acknowledge that the availability of MusicXML files is not wide enough.  I only hope this will change over time as sheet music apps for both TN and ANs get into a younger mainstream of musicians.

Even though I have some ancient programming skills, I was not willing to take on an app development effort myself.  It would have been just too overwhelming to start from scratch and learn the latest in app programming languages and tools.  Not in my 70's, not for a one time project.  So to get my custom app, I engaged three yound and energetic university Computer Science majors to develop it as their Senior project.  Now this was only a one semester project and while they didn't implement 100% of the app, they were able to implement the key TN redesigned elements of it.  So it has enough functionality to support a beginning student of music and certainly enough to do an evaluation of the notation. 

It's called the Simplified Notation app, or SNapp.  It is a browser-based app and thus can run on nearly all platforms including Windows, iOS, Linux, and Android.  With it, users can select a MusicXML file on their device for display as virtual sheet music in the format of my home-grown notation WYSIWYP.  The app can also output the sheet music as a PDF file, with which the user can open with a PDF viewer and print out the paper sheet music.

It also provides a number of formatting options such as number of measures per row, note head type and size, margin size, etc.  Options can be stored as an external file for later use.  This way the user can have a variety of "presets" for genre-related music or even score-related.

Still remaining to implement is all of the wide variety of TN symbols that are not affected by my redesign.  This will make the app full function.  Long term I also want to implement an editing capability as well as support for a hybrid of WYSIWYP and TN.  The latter would allow a student who wants to later learn TN to do so step by step by changing one element at a time:  rhythm, staves, and key signatures.

The app is open source on GitHub, and I'm hoping someday to enlist a programmer to continue development of functionality as well as other user preferences.  (Although after a year in confinement, I have learned how to make at least modest cosmetic changes and deploy them, so who knows.)  However, I want to see if the notation gets any traction before launching another round of development.

Website

I believe that the other essential criterion for success is a persuasive website that introduces and "sells" the benefits of the notation.  I have created a prototype for my notation which is not slick (it's on Google Sites) but it does describe the notation and gives the motivations for using it.  I've tried to make it as fun as possible to better engage potential users that happen onto it.  In the end, I believe success for any AN will be driven bottoms up, which today means being found and spread like a meme on the internet.

The 2nd purpose of my website is to reach out to anyone in academia to do research on ANs in general.  I would like to see published evaluations of all of the latest AN "contenders".  I don't think ANs can be decreed top down, but I do think evaluations will help sort out the candidate list for potential users.

Here is a link to my website.  It includes links to my app as well as to a short list of example MusicXML files for download.  It's all a work in progress.  Maybe someday there will be some YouTube videos to go with it (but not likely with me in them:  I want them to be cool).

Next steps

Last Spring I was poised to try to reach out to folks in academia and music education associations via "cold call" emails.  My strategy of having an app and a website makes it easier to demonstrate my points with them.  The email pitch is designed to create an interest in researching the value of alternative notations in general.  Hopefully, that would include my AN in the mix.  Alas, the pandemic arrived just as I was getting started.  As a result, I put that effort on hold in the belief that most people are too busy dealing with the pandemic to have time to look at something new from out of right field.  Hopefully once things are sorta back to normal, I will return to this task.

This approach is top-down in the sense of trying to get some blessings from above on the merits of the notation.  I don't have high hopes for this approach.  In the meantime, I have the website that may lead to some bottoms-up interest.  To be honest, I don't think there's much chance that the top down approach alone is going to be a game changer anytime soon for any AN.  Which is not to say it shouldn't be tried though.  My short experience with the music world indicates to me there is just too much resistance to change by the establishment at this time.  Overcoming a thousand years of TRADITION to put ANs into the mainstream music world is a formidable challenge.  But maybe things can change with younger generations of musicians and music educators who may be willing to take on Tradition.  (I'm now channeling this 1984 Apple Super Bowl Ad.)   

I suspect the more likely route to success is that a handful of ANs with really cool websites and videos will get discovered on the internet.  And as a result, a few will become popular and start to spread via social media.  And once they're in the popular mainstream, perhaps music instructors will get on board because their students request it.  Eventually that may lead to some in academia to take a serious look at them and bless them after the fact.

Beyond my own project

I think the MNMA Research Project demonstrated that consensus on a single "best" alternative notation is probably not going to happen.  Hey, there's no consensus on the criteria for selecting the NCAA National Champion in football either.  In both cases, this is because there is not a universal consensus on the criteria for "best".  Is there one "best" car for everyone?  One "best" ice cream flavor?  People have different needs and preferences.  Likewise, I think with respect to sheet music notation there is not a one size fits all solution.  I think there is room for a wide range of notations that suit the needs of different musicians at different times in their musical journeys.  The needs of professional musicians, composers, academics, beginning students, and lifelong amateur piano players are not the same.  Personally, I think the more ANs to choose from, the better.

But there must be a means by which users and researchers can try out different designs in order to evaluate them.  To do so, sheet music must be available in some form: on paper, in a PDF file, or on a screen app.  That is a formidable task no matter how you slice it.  In my view, the app is the simpler approach in the long run, but programming a custom app is not something most people can do.

However, I believe it would be possible to have a so-called universal app that could be easily customized for the vast majority of alternative notations.  So yes, this app would be a big job, but it would need to be developed only once.  Even if the app were not 100% full function for every AN, musicians would still be able to take different ANs for a test drive.  And researchers might find it to be a useful tool in the evaluation of different ANs.  The goal would be to identify candidates and motivate further development by the their designers and others.  And then later full function custom apps might be the way to go for the most promising ones.

I think a universal app is feasible based on my experience with the development of my own custom app.  In a mere three months, three university students were able to build an app that would support at least an evaluation of the notation.  And this effort was by no means a full time occupation for them as they had other classes (and pre-pandemic football games to attend).  In my retired programmer opinion, the added task of generalizing it to support different AN formats would not be a major challenge.

Here's what I see as the key elements of a Universal app:

1.       An AN would be defined by an XML format input file.

2.       An input score would be defined by an input MusicXML file.

3.       The app would process the two input files and display virtual Sheet music on a device screen.

4.       User preference customization of the output would be available.

 The notation's XML input file would define staff lines (location, type, color), note heads (symbols), and rhythm (duration symbols or timeline format).  The definitions file is created with a text editor.  I am currently working on a "spec" for these XML definitions.  I think it will handle all but maybe a few exceptions of the ANs on this website as well as Dodeka and Klavarskribo.

However, the spec is as far as I plan to take this idea.  I will leave the actual development of such an app that processes it as your homework assignment.  Actually my dream would be that MuseScore takes on this challenge (Ha!).  Depending upon their implementation it might not be that difficult, or it could be impossible.  But I'm guessing in either case, they're not going to be interested because it would be TN heresy. 

When my spec is ready I plan to post it on this forum in the way outside chance that anyone would like to pursue the idea.  If anyone does, then my open source app could provide some insights into how to design it (at least for elements 2 through 4 above).

I apologize for the length of this post.  I anticipate getting a lot of pushback of my whacko ideas.  And that's fine.  That's what a forum is about.  But maybe if I only post once a year I won't totally wear out my welcome.  Cheers.

[Benjamin Spratling]

Howdy,

I had also identified MusicXML as the best input file format for my app, SingAccord, which is designed to help non-musicians sing along in church during musical worship, and the initial version of it can import music from only 1 format, MusicXML.  Unfortunately, survey results indicated 5/6 of the people who would be operating the app (typically, secretaries or junior-high-aged volunteers) would not be able to read traditional music notation, but did want to be able to rapidly change the order of sections in a song.  This meant the app had to be able to “stitch” together the sections based on a drag-and-drop UI and would half to make lining-up of pickup beats and trailing beats “just work” with no additional input from the user, who likely wouldn’t understand what “pickup beats” are.

Based on obtaining selections of Finale and Sibelius files from 3 publishers and discussing with professionals in the orchestration / engraving community, I determined there is no agreed-upon / generally-followed way to designate where pickup beats begin.  It may work in traditional hymns to infer pickup beats where the first measure does not have as many beats as indicated by the time signature, or if there is a double barline in the middle of a measure.  But in modern song forms, the number of pickup beats can change from verse to chorus to bridge to verse 3 to chorus 2.  And some songs require understanding the meanings of the lyrics to know which notes are pickup beats. Also, after obtaining original composition files from a few publishers, I determined their engravers make a large number of mistakes which prevent the song from being exported correctly to MusicXML.  Sibelius is the worst at just leaving things out entirely when they aren’t 100% correct.  Musicians can gloss over such mistakes using “musician’s intuition”, but for a program to do that could require an intractable amount of coding.

Thus I determined I would no longer ask publishers to sell their content in MusicXML, since no automated import script could reliably infer the section boundaries.  Instead, I’ve spent the last year doing the thing I had hoped to avoid: building a graphical editor in my custom music notation, and I will begin selling songs in my own custom format from my own web store.  However, the editor app will be available for free, so that publishers can use it to convert their MusicXML files and then fix their own songs.

I’d love to work together to lobby the MusicXML community group decision makers, a.k.a. Michael Good, to add features to specify the # of pickup beats, or mark that in music notation explicitly, so that such decisions could be made in the original composition files.  But we’d have to convince Finale, Sibelius and Dorico, et. al. to include it.  Can you get them to answer the phone when you call?  I never managed it.  Or to lobby the composition app makers to improve their MusicXML export to better enable an ecosystem of notation-related functionality other than just printing, which seem to be what their apps are designed to produce.  Again, what do you say in an email to get someone to read all of it / engage with you, to fix the problems in their lives.  Most people I’ve encountered don’t want to hear it, because they get a steady onslaught of junk email.

I also determined that publishers would have to be the ones to do the conversions into my format, because some of them are so deathly afraid of letting anyone get access to their original File / Sibelius files.  However, I am looking to simply pre-paying for small-volume licenses to sell some of the most popular songs, and manually engrave them myself.

-Ben

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[Waller Dominique]

Hi Ben,

Would'nt it be a solution to start each time with a full measure including the necessary silences to fill it before the "pickup beats" ?

dominique

envoyé : 12 avril 2021 à 21:18
de : 'Benjamin Spratling' via The Music Notation Project | Forum <musicn...@googlegroups.com>
à : musicn...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [MNP] Yet another simplified notation - an update one year later

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[Stuart Byrom]

OK.  I humbly request if members want to start another conversation on a different topic please do so.  Otherwise as a courtesy to those in the future that want to be able to research a topic can do so without having to filter out other topics.  Also as a courtesy to the member who opened the conversation.

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[John Keller]

Hi Stuart.

Good point.

I really like your simplified notation and congratulations on your progress over the year.

Very interesting reading all about it.

Cheers,

John Keller

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[lettersquash]

Hi Stuart,

No pushback on your whacko ideas from me, mate! I assume you're well aware of the mismatch between the output of your program and the criteria preferred by the MNP, but I admire the work you've put into this. Although you delegated some programming, of course, the vision and organisation of all that is impressive. I've waxed tedious on here already about the subject of programs in the future printing or displaying personalized notation systems for players.

I do a bit of programming, but mostly in non-mainstream languages like some flabours of BASIC and AutoHotkey. These do for me to write my own bespoke sketchy stuff, but I've yet to look at midi or MusicXML. I did get some way towards a useable scorewriter for traditional notation a long while back, and also began a similar thing for concert flute tabulature.

Anyway, all the best with the project, I'll watch for more progress with interest. (Could you send me some students, please? ;)

John Freestone

[Stuart Byrom]

Thanks John.  I'm wondering if you have written up your experiences with Express Stave as a teaching tool as I have lots of questions:  Do you have in person instruction?  Do your students use both TN and ES ?  Have any of them learned to play exclusively with ES (skipping TN altogether).   Are any of your students children?  

Stuart

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[John Keller]

Stuart, 

These days all my students are children. And I only teach by video phone. Most learn ES and TN.

Some I took over after they had started with someone else and in that case they don’t want to learn ES and thats ok.

In the early years I had a couple of students just on ES. One boy did well and wanted to go to tertiary music after high school. Unfortunately he was not actually musically talented ear-wise and because he had difficulty learning TN he eventually dropped out. It was a pity because he really wanted to teach piano.

After that I tried to teach everyone both ES and TN.

My best students read both very well and can play things like Moonlight Sonata in ES after 1 or 2 years. One 14 yo has finished Chopin Nocturne in Eb. He is another bright but not naturally musical type.

I have a 10 yo who has more or less mastered Fantasie Impromptu. He seemed rusty in TN at his last lesson. Its a balancing act.

One teen girl I taught today had learnt by rote from her first teacher and did exams without learning to read TN at all. I really struggled with her for a few years as she was rather troubled and uncooperative. Now she is reading ES with Moonlight Sonata having done Girl with the Flaxen Hair (ES) for a school performance where she told me today she got full marks. She picks the pieces she likes and I do it in ES if it is in a difficult key sig (more than 1 # or b). We are also working on Mozart Sonata Facile in C (TN) and we usually pick and learn a pop song by ear as well. She has changed to a good cooperative student.

Im still developing my beginners method. Basically I have too many pieces and can’t get round to choosing which ones to sequence into the next edition of my beginners books. They are all on my Wiki page.

Going through chemotherapy makes it hard at the moment but the treatment does seem to be working.

It is virtually impossible to get other teachers interested in my methods, although some have liked some of my ideas. Calling the black key HIJKL is too much for them. 

Thanks for your interest.

Cheers,

John Keller

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[Stuart Byrom]

John, your response is exactly what I was interested in hearing.  Thanks for taking the time to lay it out.   For students who want to be “serious”, I guess it’s still going to be necessary for a long time to learn TN to be accepted by, and function within, the music mainstream.  I think your videos and lesson books are fabulous and it’s frustrating to me that your notation is not more widely distributed and discovered as it is so worthy of being an alternative to TN.  Have you ever considered writing up your notation and teaching experience for submission to music educators? 

I’m glad to hear your treatment is going well.  My wife is a breast cancer survivor and we both have spent way too much time in hospital waiting rooms.  Her story has a happy ending though.  She is cancer-free after seven years.  May yours be as well.   Hang in there.

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[Stuart Byrom]

Hi John Freestone,

 

I've appreciated your recent posts to this forum as well as your personal website.  

 

I presume your comment is referring to my diatonic octave instead of the chromatic requirement.  I confess it was not my intention to necessarily sign up for the MNMA criteria with my design.  My mission is to make reading music as easy as possible with the goal of more students learning to play music and sticking with it, hopefully for a lifetime.  My first re-designs of TN were chromatic as the criteria calls for.  But in the end, I made the decision that 12 notes required too much vertical space and too many lines for beginners.   So my trade-off is to have the diatonic 7 note space with explicit noteheads for sharps and flats.  Plus it maps nicely to the piano keyboard.  I confess I have crashed the MNP party with my diatonic design in order to just get it out there and on the record.  For professional musicians, composers, improvisors, and those in academia, the chromatic route is the best.   In any case, I think there should be choices according to user needs and preferences.  

 

Your waxing on alternative notation apps is definitely not tedious to me.  I couldn't agree more.   I think without them, nothing is going to change.  If you want to take on the universal app project, I grant you all of the royalties (ha!).

 

Regards, Stuart

 

Post Script

I don't want to start a festouche as a newcomer on the scene, but IMHO, a number of the MNMA's own candidates didn't follow all the rules either.  For example, some Twinline notations do not have a fully proportional pitch coordinate.  These designs have some staff positions where notes overlap all but completely and so for my eye it is necessary to determine the pitch from the shape/color of the notehead (e.g., F  F# G).  I realize I'm treading on hallowed ground here, so I will leave it at that.  But my point is that I think it's OK to break the rules if there is a good reason to do so.  And the reduction in vertical staff space for the Twinline designs is a good one.

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[lettersquash]

Hi Stuart,

"I've appreciated your recent posts to this forum as well as your personal website. "

Thanks, that's good to hear.

"I presume your comment is referring to my diatonic octave instead of the chromatic requirement."

There are a few things (which is natural given that it is computer output). As well as the diatonic octave, it uses coloured lines, beat tics and shaded duration signs, etc., making it fail criteria 1 & 2 (about being able to hand write it) and 7 (no colours or shading).

"I confess it was not my intention to necessarily sign up for the MNMA criteria with my design.  My mission is to make reading music as easy as possible with the goal of more students learning to play music and sticking with it, hopefully for a lifetime."

Excellent. As well as coming up with the best name. WYSIWYP. Brilliant.

"My first re-designs of TN were chromatic as the criteria calls for.  But in the end, I made the decision that 12 notes required too much vertical space and too many lines for beginners."

I think Express Stave has hit the sweet spot on most things. I'm working on the problem, partly because I've got obsessed with it just for an academic exercise, but I keep thinking, what am I doing, it's been solved! I had immediate criticisms of it, but John answered those points well, and some of my reaction was simply unfamiliarity. I haven't tried reading it very much, but there was a point where it clicked, and it shouldn't be a problem now. I also think it's worth working on other systems, as you do.

"So my trade-off is to have the diatonic 7 note space with explicit noteheads for sharps and flats.  Plus it maps nicely to the piano keyboard."

Yes. My personal preference is to get rid of sharps and flats and key signatures, but there will be advantages to notating them (such as a more faithful representation of pieces written in particular keys).

"I don't want to start a festouche as a newcomer on the scene, but IMHO, a number of the MNMA's own candidates didn't follow all the rules either.  For example, some Twinline notations do not have a fully proportional pitch coordinate.  These designs have some staff positions where notes overlap all but completely and so for my eye it is necessary to determine the pitch from the shape/color of the notehead (e.g., F  F# G).  I realize I'm treading on hallowed ground here, so I will leave it at that.  But my point is that I think it's OK to break the rules if there is a good reason to do so.  And the reduction in vertical staff space for the Twinline designs is a good one."

I think they'd agree (whoever "they" are!). Those aren't hard and fast rules. They assess each submission and things that are close enough, but don't meet particular criteria, are noted as such in the listings. It does strike me as an almost impossible task to meet them all, but that flexible approach is good. On the other hand, some submissions are rejected, presumably because they don't meet enough criteria, or satisfy them well enough, or they fail on an "essential" requirement, as per #7:

"The notation is writable using only a single color on a contrasting background (for example black on white) without shading or tinting.  Such a monochrome system offers the maximum in simplicity and convenience, and is considered essential, especially since many people have some degree of color-blindness."

I know I don't need to repeat it, as we're on the same page, but app display/printout can avoid such problems. I wouldn't choose the red and blue lines, probably, as I'm rather red-insensitive ("red-green colour-blind"). So, big deal, I tweak the Preferences.

I'm on a steep learning curve. One moment I was all for abandoning handwriting provision and advocating apps, then I had second thoughts, and now I've heard there are handwriting recognition apps for notation! Even so, there's something nice about making real physical marks on paper, and it would be nice to retain that ability in a notation system.

Best,

John

[stuar...@gmail.com]

John F., you are totally correct that the app could implement features to put it more in compliance with some of the MNMA criteria.  I have already considered them.  For example, it’s possible to substitute solid and dashed lines for red and blue or substitute other colors (this was already on my long to do list for the future).  However, addressing handwriting of a notation for beginning students of music is just not a goal of mine.  But these things are not the crux of what I see as the larger problem.  Which is that the dream of a one size fits all approach to notation is a myth.  And thus, for me, meeting the all of the criteria disappeared off my radar screen. I think you nailed it when you said about the criteria:

“It does strike me as an almost impossible task to meet them all, but that flexible approach is good.”

To separate the most significant target audiences, there are the music composers and the music notation readers.  So all the factors regarding ease of handwriting and being able to see (truly) proportional intervals are important to the former.  But for me, I just want to read the music as easily as possible and play it. I think I am not alone in this. And so my view is that there should be lots of viable notations.  And all of them together should address all of the elements of the MNMA list.  Then, musicians can pick the ones they want at the time they want.  And none of them individually are likely to be perfect according to the list.  As an amateur woodworker, I can tell you that you need more than one tool to build a table.

One last remark as I agree that we are on the same page. If attention were to be focused on any single MNMA criterion, I say let it be this one:

#5.  The notation is relatively simple so as to be practical for both children and adults.

Cheers and thanks for your thoughtful response.

Stuart

[lettersquash]

Hi Stuart,

I had a bit more time tonight to peruse your wysiwyp.org website, and I have to say it's great. Your open source, not-for-profit approach is admirable, your description of the system is clear, and your vision for the future is ambitious too. My goals are a bit different, although it's early days and I'm still experimenting and changing those as I go.

I can see the rationale for wysiwyp, and it even made me question my preference on the sharps/flats issue, because I can see it would be easy for beginners to deal just with the named, white notes, then adjust up or down (and the added option to use just sharps or flats is a good one), but for me that style of representation of the 12 semitones is overshadowed by my desire for isometric pitch representation.

However, your approach gives a better potential link, perhaps, to TN, since sharps and flats are what those students will have to deal with, and maybe adjusting from a system with discrete positions for the "extras" to one without might be a difficult step - I've not had to try it, so I don't know. All I know is that for me a sharp or flat indicated on its natural position sets me back quite a bit when sight reading TN (since a lot of sight reading is done by judging intervals).

As I said before, a system with accidentals has another potential advantage of representing pieces' original composition more faithfully, which some find important (one I found actually adds symbols to indicate how they've been transcribed to the simpler system!).

So those are good reasons to stick with it. I know the other reason you mentioned, perhaps the main one, was about the height of a staff for all 12 semitones. It's certainly an issue, but I'm playing about with some ways to fit them in. However, what I wanted to say is that the size of the note positions in your system is really quite large (depending on whether the pics I've seen are scaled, I suppose), and although that might be useful for young children new to reading music, I would have thought it could be reduced significantly without losing clarity. That, again, is easy to write into the app, and you will no doubt have a variable for the scale already.

It's a separate issue, of course - you won't want to expend the saved height on 5 accidental lines, and I think the problem of the 12 is more to do with visually indicating that number for the reader. It usually means more lines or different head shapes, etc..

I also wondered about suggesting a tweak to the horizontal positioning, though. First, I must say that your discussion of proportional note value graphics was very persuasive (something I haven't put much thought into yet), but I wonder if the notes' centres would be better aligning with the 'tics' and bar lines, rather than their leading edge. This is a more mathematically correct position, I think, and also avoids increasing degrees of error as shorter notes are drawn. Or maybe that would only make sense with very small notes.

The note itself takes up space, so I guess in my suggestion, its centre indicates precisely where it starts and its size is fairly irrelevant. As you have it, it clearly takes up some fraction of a beat (and that would be a limiting factor in how short a note you could indicate). But I'm not sure - again, for simple music without crazy short notes, and for beginners and children, that might be better. I noticed Klavarskribo puts the tails (for which hand plays a note) exactly on the beat, and it looked awkward at first, but after a while it made more sense. Of course, unfortunately, it then puts the note heads above or below, which messes up the proportionality. It certainly looks odd when a black note is drawn before (above) the first bar line! I've been doing some Klavar-like program outputs without the 'hand' lines, and it has seemed quite natural to put my circles etc. bang on the bar and beat lines.

The shaded duration line is a great solution unavailable in a strict binary monochrome as per the criteria. It can't be done with a line, as it interferes with staff lines. Klavar uses the keep playing until another note or a stop sign happens, except if there's a continuation dot at that point method, which isn't as good. Some players prefer to have the note duration given up front, but, as you remark on your site, those values have to be remembered and compared as the score progresses.

The whole method of adding up values, including rests, to complete a bar (and therefore the necessity of tied notes) is bonkers. It's further complicated by the use of the series of lines (I forget what they're called) connecting shorter value notes, which leave little orphan ones in odd places, and single notes with them hanging... then the dotted notes, double dotted notes...it's possibly worse than the pitch indication! (Unfortunately, this - and a little difficulty with the different heads - is making me re-think my view of Express Stave for my own preferences, although it's a superb design.)

I suspect alternative notation designers who retain it are mostly fairly proficient in TN. I'm kind of beginner-to-intermediate, and it was tempting to make do with it since I just about get by, but the examples of even moderately complex rhythm on a video you linked to on syncopation reminded me I'm lost once it gets like that, and in fact I play so much by ear I probably couldn't have learned half the pieces I play without recordings or demonstration, or they would have taken a lot of study. Sometimes the squiggles just remind me what's going on in my head!

I'm torn on how much I want to learn of TN. I thought I'd keep at it, but if a suitable AN came along I might abandon TN altogether.

Thanks,

John

[stuar...@gmail.com]

Hey John F.   My responses to your comments below in italics.

I had a bit more time tonight to peruse your wysiwyp.org website, and I have to say it's great. Your open source, not-for-profit approach is admirable, your description of the system is clear, and your vision for the future is ambitious too. My goals are a bit different, although it's early days and I'm still experimenting and changing those as I go.

I appreciate those kind words.  I’ve not gotten any other constructive feedback on this forum.   

I’d be interested to hear your goals if you’re prepared to share them.  (Maybe I just missed them elsewhere on the forum.)

I can see the rationale for wysiwyp, and it even made me question my preference on the sharps/flats issue, because I can see it would be easy for beginners to deal just with the named, white notes, then adjust up or down (and the added option to use just sharps or flats is a good one), but for me that style of representation of the 12 semitones is overshadowed by my desire for isometric pitch representation.

However, your approach gives a better potential link, perhaps, to TN, since sharps and flats are what those students will have to deal with, and maybe adjusting from a system with discrete positions for the "extras" to one without might be a difficult step - I've not had to try it, so I don't know. All I know is that for me a sharp or flat indicated on its natural position sets me back quite a bit when sight reading TN (since a lot of sight reading is done by judging intervals).

As I said before, a system with accidentals has another potential advantage of representing pieces' original composition more faithfully, which some find important (one I found actually adds symbols to indicate how they've been transcribed to the simpler system!).

So those are good reasons to stick with it. I know the other reason you mentioned, perhaps the main one, was about the height of a staff for all 12 semitones. It's certainly an issue, but I'm playing about with some ways to fit them in. However, what I wanted to say is that the size of the note positions in your system is really quite large (depending on whether the pics I've seen are scaled, I suppose), and although that might be useful for young children new to reading music, I would have thought it could be reduced significantly without losing clarity. That, again, is easy to write into the app, and you will no doubt have a variable for the scale already.

Yes, the app does already have a user preference for note head size (which results in changing the staff space for it).  On my to-do list is to allow for even smaller sizes so that it can be even smaller.  In fact, I may actually implement this before too long (‘cause I want it!)  For myself, when I’m learning a piece, I use a larger size.  Once, I’ve pretty much “got it”, I use a smaller size so more Grandstaff rows fit on a printed page.  Besides, in my view, once you “have it”, playing is more a matter of muscle memory than individual note reading.  Like the difference between processing entire words in a sentence as an adult vs. having to read individual letters as a child.  BTW, the design and the app implementation is a 50% overlap of adjacent diatonic scale degrees just as with TN.  Maybe overlap amount would also be a candidate for a user preference.  On the website, the figures are definitely oversized just for clarity of presentation.

It's a separate issue, of course - you won't want to expend the saved height on 5 accidental lines, and I think the problem of the 12 is more to do with visually indicating that number for the reader. It usually means more lines or different head shapes, etc..  Yep !

I also wondered about suggesting a tweak to the horizontal positioning, though. First, I must say that your discussion of proportional note value graphics was very persuasive (something I haven't put much thought into yet), but I wonder if the notes' centres would be better aligning with the 'tics' and bar lines, rather than their leading edge. This is a more mathematically correct position, I think, and also avoids increasing degrees of error as shorter notes are drawn. Or maybe that would only make sense with very small notes.

The note itself takes up space, so I guess in my suggestion, its centre indicates precisely where it starts and its size is fairly irrelevant. As you have it, it clearly takes up some fraction of a beat (and that would be a limiting factor in how short a note you could indicate). But I'm not sure - again, for simple music without crazy short notes, and for beginners and children, that might be better. I noticed Klavarskribo puts the tails (for which hand plays a note) exactly on the beat, and it looked awkward at first, but after a while it made more sense. Of course, unfortunately, it then puts the note heads above or below, which messes up the proportionality. It certainly looks odd when a black note is drawn before (above) the first bar line! I've been doing some Klavar-like program outputs without the 'hand' lines, and it has seemed quite natural to put my circles etc. bang on the bar and beat lines.

I think your comments on the exact positioning of the note head are all good ideas.  Aligning the center of the note head on the beat makes a lot of sense.  Implementing them between rows on the virtual sheet music is a little tricky.  Just as you describe with Klavar, It would be a little awkward for a row to end with half of a note head and the other half be continued on the beginning of the next row.   Probably the best solution would be to put nothing on the bar at the end of the 1st row and put the entire note at the beginning of the 2nd row (and half of it ahead of the bar line).    

Your idea of using smaller notes is a good one too.  Offering skinnier (horizontally) note heads might help visually push it to the left better without going whole hog alignment on the beat.  The app already has preferences for note head types, so this wouldn’t be difficult to implement.  I’m also thinking that it might be nice to have the ability to “stretch” a measure if there are an excessive number of really short notes compared to the rest of the score.  Some may find this confusing though, since then the beat duration wouldn’t be exactly the same across all measures.  So that’s why this would also be a user preference.

You can tell that I’m really into user preferences.  So this seems like an appropriate time for me to re-emphasize why I think apps are the key to the future.  The value of being able to customize the notation cannot be underestimated.  There is never going to be a design that satisfies everyone for every detail. 

The shaded duration line is a great solution unavailable in a strict binary monochrome as per the criteria. It can't be done with a line, as it interferes with staff lines. Klavar uses the keep playing until another note or a stop sign happens, except if there's a continuation dot at that point method, which isn't as good. Some players prefer to have the note duration given up front, but, as you remark on your site, those values have to be remembered and compared as the score progresses.

Yeah, you are certainly correct on this.  The main problem I have with Klavar is you have to look ahead to find the stop sign or the next note.  As you might guess I like that the stripe just stands out visually and I think easier to read.  And again, I’m not even attempting to solve the handwriting criteria with my notation.   

The whole method of adding up values, including rests, to complete a bar (and therefore the necessity of tied notes) is bonkers. It's further complicated by the use of the series of lines (I forget what they're called) connecting shorter value notes, which leave little orphan ones in odd places, and single notes with them hanging... then the dotted notes, double dotted notes...it's possibly worse than the pitch indication! (Unfortunately, this - and a little difficulty with the different heads - is making me re-think my view of Express Stave for my own preferences, although it's a superb design.)

Here you are preaching to the choir.  That’s why I prefer a graphical representation of note (and rest) duration.  In my design, all symbols regarding a note's duration (dots, ties, articulations, etc.) are all combined into a single visual element that can cross measure boundaries.  I continue to be amazed at the hoops one has to jump through to be able to implement a note duration crossing a bar line with TN (as demonstrated by that YouTube video on syncopation).

On the other hand, I do recognize the graphical approach probably turns off most TN readers at the get-go.  I am the first to admit that the stripes have a rather charmless and machine-like cold appearance.  Whereas the flows and flourishes of TN flags, clefs, slurs, and ties are very attractive to look at in my opinion.  It’s like the difference between Western text and Japanese characters. 

I suspect alternative notation designers who retain it are mostly fairly proficient in TN. I'm kind of beginner-to-intermediate, and it was tempting to make do with it since I just about get by, but the examples of even moderately complex rhythm on a video you linked to on syncopation reminded me I'm lost once it gets like that, and in fact I play so much by ear I probably couldn't have learned half the pieces I play without recordings or demonstration, or they would have taken a lot of study. Sometimes the squiggles just remind me what's going on in my head!

Alas, I think for the foreseeable future, if you are going to communicate with the current music world, you just have to learn TN and all the terminology that goes with it.  And even if some excellent ANs like Express Stave become popular, there is not going to be a wholesale conversion by that world.  I suspect the only way TN will ever truly be replaced in any large way is when children learn ANs from the outset and they grow up with them.  And even then, it will probably take a number of generations.  The is one factor that might accelerate things, but I will save that discussion for another day to avoid getting too off subject here.

I'm torn on how much I want to learn of TN. I thought I'd keep at it, but if a suitable AN came along I might abandon TN altogether.

Clearly, you’re just going to have to invent one yourself !   (And, you can program your own app!)

After several months of trying to read TN, I gave up in frustration and subsequently decided to design a notation that is logical, consistent, and intuitive.  And after I got my app, I decided that I am never going to try again to become a proficient reader of TN.  But I have the luxury of not having to interact with anyone outside of my musical bubble (fortunately, I have a piano playing wife for guidance on playing technique).  So my music playing goal is simply to enjoy playing the tunes I love.   And the goal of my wysiwyp project is to exercise my 71 year old brain and to have some fun solving what I see as an engineering problem.  Everything beyond that is gravy.

 

I can’t express my gratitude enough for the time you have spent on my project.  I very much value your feedback and suggestions.  I look forward to returning the favor on yours.

Stuart

[John Keller]

Hi all,

I have added a page of naturals to this file, showing how ES is similar to notes within the bass clef.

This file gives practice on the extras and naturals separately.

http://musicnotation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Black-Key-Geography.pdf

Cheers,
John Keller

[lettersquash]

Hi Stuart, I'll just reply to a couple of points from yours for now:

"I appreciate those kind words.  I’ve not gotten any other constructive feedback on this forum."

But John Keller's response was positive. Maybe you mean last time, a year ago.

I don't think of your presence as crashing the MNP party, by the way, because the group is about people interested in the subject of alternative musical notations, not just those that fit a list of criteria, and you're not just interested in the subject, you're designing a solution. I'm not sure what others might think, or any "official" line, and I'm not too bothered!

Have you had positive feedback elsewhere? Any users who have adopted the system and liked it, or maybe it's too early yet?

"I’d be interested to hear your goals if you’re prepared to share them.  (Maybe I just missed them elsewhere on the forum.)"

They're so sketchy at the moment there's not a lot to share. Of course, a big part of it is the same as you, getting the impression lots of people are put off learning to read music, and my own frustration with it.

I'd like to learn some moderately complex music (mostly classical, mostly on the piano, although I play guitar and a bit of flute and recorder). So I'd not want a system to be unable to handle fairly complex music or be just an introductory system as a bridge to TN. I think, however, that the standard "Western" styles are enough to fit into one system, so I'm not intending to include microtones or other wilder imaginings. I see different enharmonic notations of the "same" pitch as one of the problems of TN, so I wouldn't consider both sharps and flats as in your system (although user prefs gets round that) and I'd prefer the "extras" to be seen to occupy their own space along with the naturals to provide isometric spacing and proportional intervals at any transposition.

Where I am now is just trying all sorts of things. Since the design follows from ideal criteria and necessary compromises, it keeps changing. I've tried coming at it from the paper-and-pencil direction and the app direction (in my case just the bare bones of a set of lines with notes on so I can try the designs), from the Klavar/piano-roll end of things and the 12-equal-tones end. My ideas are beginning to get less fickle, but hardly crystalizing either.

I'm reluctant to write about the details so that nobody steals my ideas, and I get all the credit when I invent the winning solution that changes the world, mwuhahahaha. My saner head knows it will be a long collaboration of people over time and probably not involve me at all! The puzzle of it has just captivated me at the moment. I don't want to bore anyone with long descriptions of my process, but if you wanted more details I'd be happy to do that by email.

"Clearly, you’re just going to have to invent one yourself !   (And, you can program your own app!)"

Hmmm...tempting, but certainly I'd have to catch up a lot on stuff like MIDI or XML, and I don't feel I know enough about musical theory or TN, at least to approach the "more complex" ideal - I could probably write a beginner one. There again, I don't stick at projects enough - I'm in the middle of years of development of a text note organiser that I do in fits and starts, and all my programming these days is just for my own use. I did have ambition to write stuff to publish, but I can't be bothered with all the platform and installation and dependency side of things. Maybe I'll get to it though if I stay interested long enough.

"Yes, the app does already have a user preference for note head size (which results in changing the staff space for it).  On my to-do list is to allow for even smaller sizes so that it can be even smaller.  In fact, I may actually implement this before too long (‘cause I want it!)"

After I wrote that suggestion, I realised it has some problems, since the note height shrinks too (or you distort it). I didn't think of the problem of ends of staff either. I'd be tempted either to stick with your version, but maybe it would need to be clear that a note itself signifies a specific duration (which might have to be defined for a piece as the smallest it will use), or else maybe go for as thin a line as possible with the lighter stripe ending as a rectangle. Dodeka uses black stripes without a distinction between note start and its duration, and I think it can only indicate repeated notes by leaving a little gap between the stripes. They're too dark for my liking, and yours are better (I'd hate to use that much black ink printing a page of Dodeka!).

One other thing came to be about that (from reading your site, I think), that maybe your idea of putting all relevant features of note duration into the graphic could extend to minor differences like slurs and legato at one end to staccato at the other. Strictly representationally, it could just be small/zero versus bigger gaps between notes (since staccato could be written with short notes and rests, but the dot is a simpler method), or you/one might change something about the shape or shade of the stripe. I also thought it would be interesting if the stripe got thinner, indicating decay, and/or its width or density indicated volume, but either of these might be distracting and unnecessary, and it might be better to give the overall dynamic in the usual way or some other way (since different notes played at different dynamics is rare to indicate specifically, it's usually left to interpretation - however, it's a potential improvement on TN's capabilities to do so), and the decay is usually a simple property of the instrument. It's amazing the possibilities that open up when you take the app approach and graph things more rationally, as you describe.

Regarding preferences, sometimes a lot of options is good, but sometimes it's good to try ideas and then just go with your judgement, or get second opinions and then stick to one thing - at least it makes the programming a bit easier.

"The main problem I have with Klavar is you have to look ahead to find the stop sign or the next note."

That's interesting, I'd not noticed it as a problem, but I don't find the stop signs and continuation signs easy either. I've found it more difficult to read than I thought it would be for a variety of reasons, and one of them is the width of anything with two or three octaves, requiring lots of eye movements to gather the info. Another is the displaced black and white notes above and below the tails, which interferes with the proportional time dimension. Left and right tails (precisely aligned with the timing) simply doesn't work to indicate left and right hands if the hands are crossed, because you just end up with a continuous line with some notes on it (although most of the time you could figure it out, perhaps).

I'm very happy to talk about all this and give feedback on your system, because it helps me think through things better if I have to write them, and I'm learning a lot from your project. I agree the likely future will be as kids grab these ideas and ignore TN, and maybe sooner than we think there will be a few virtuosos demonstrating how powerful it is and laughing at the hieroglyphics the dinos use! Things like this can look impossible one year and then hit a critical mass when everything goes into high gear.

Very glad to have met you,

John

[stuar...@gmail.com]

Response to  John F.    This thread is getting a bit full, so I’m editing it down a bit. Your comments in italics.

On the subject of feedback

But John Keller's response was positive. Maybe you mean last time, a year ago.

Yes John K. gave a positive response to both my original post (a year ago) as well as this year’s.  You are the only one who has commented specifically on the design and to offer some valuable thoughts and suggestions.  Otherwise, no one else has commented on the design in either post.

Have you had positive feedback elsewhere? Any users who have adopted the system and liked it, or maybe it's too early yet?

No, I don’t have any users on board (not counting myself).  I don’t have web statistics setup on the website (but hope to eventually) so I don’t know if anyone has even seen it.  I have a contact email listed there but have not gotten anything.  So it’s not exactly burning up the internet.  When I get a paid-for web hosting service, I will opt for Search Engine Optimization in the hopes that will allow it to be found more easily.  So, hopes high, expectations low for now.  As I said in the original post, my plan is to start lobbying academia, etc. later this year.

 

On the subject of your goals

(Deleted most of your comment here for brevity sake).

I'm reluctant to write about the details so that nobody steals my ideas, and I get all the credit when I invent the winning solution that changes the world, mwuhahahaha. My saner head knows it will be a long collaboration of people over time and probably not involve me at all! The puzzle of it has just captivated me at the moment. I don't want to bore anyone with long descriptions of my process, but if you wanted more details I'd be happy to do that by email.

So your approach is to run through the myriad of ideas and approaches already out there first.  There’s a lot to digest and with which to experiment.  But I’m sure your design will indeed change the world.   

I took the opposite approach to design development.  I did not investigate other ANs until after I had created my own.  And only then found out that I wasn’t as original as I thought I was.  But even so, I think when all design elements are put together I have a unique one. 

 

On the topic of writing your own app

"Clearly, you’re just going to have to invent one yourself !   (And, you can program your own app!)"   

Hmmm...tempting, but certainly I'd have to catch up a lot on stuff like MIDI or XML, and I don't feel I know enough about musical theory or TN, at least to approach the "more complex" ideal - I could probably write a beginner one. There again, I don't stick at projects enough - I'm in the middle of years of development of a text note organiser that I do in fits and starts, and all my programming these days is just for my own use. I did have ambition to write stuff to publish, but I can't be bothered with all the platform and installation and dependency side of things. Maybe I'll get to it though if I stay interested long enough.

From my experience, you will probably find that you get really tired of manually translating TN scores to your format.  (If you can believe it, I used spreadsheets for a long time!)  Anyway, at that point, you may reconsider writing that custom app.  And for sure, it’s a big time commitment to get back into serious software development.  I wasn’t willing to do it (for a one time deal).  But with all your projects you may change your mind.  Hey, you’re young.

 

On the subject of note head preferences

With respect to the positioning of the note head relative to the beat, as usual I think there’s no one design the suits everyone.  For now, I think I have to emphasize in my documentation that the note starts at the leading edge of the note head.  The stripe re-enforces this but it’s difficult to see behind the note head.  But your ideas remain on my futures list.

With respect to other note head and stripe design, I am astounded that you have thought of similar ideas with which I have played around.  Yes, my plan is that when staccatos are implemented there will be a bit of a shortening of the stripe.  The question is, how much because as you say it’s up to the musician.  (hey, I’ve got an idea, how about a user preference!)  And as far as note decay, I was thinking of having a color gradient of the stripe that would fade from beginning to end (assuming the sustain pedal is not engaged).  I also have in my design notes, the idea of having the stripe expand from note head to the end of the tail to indicate crescendos;  the opposite for diminuendos. (The app currently implements the TN style symbols for these.)  Another idea was to have a user preference (of course) for the stripe appearance.  Offer options that look like wings, flames, lightning bolts, whatever, just to overcome that lackluster look of the notation.  This was when I was trying to think of things to pretty up the look to compete with TN. All of these of course did not make the cut for the beta version of the app.  Needless to say, these whacko ideas need a lot more thought and experimentation.

 

On the subject of Klavar (looking ahead)

That's interesting, I'd not noticed it as a problem, but I don't find the stop signs and continuation signs easy either. I've found it more difficult to read than I thought it would be for a variety of reasons, and one of them is the width of anything with two or three octaves, requiring lots of eye movements to gather the info. Another is the displaced black and white notes above and below the tails, which interferes with the proportional time dimension. Left and right tails (precisely aligned with the timing) simply doesn't work to indicate left and right hands if the hands are crossed, because you just end up with a continuous line with some notes on it (although most of the time you could figure it out, perhaps).

I totally agree with you on the width problem.  It’s the same reason I avoided the height problems with chromatic designs on the horizontal with my design.  Also I haven’t seen, maybe you have, how some of the MNMA designs would handle isolated notes at the pitch extremes.  Replicate the octaves all the way up and down?  Implement the equivalent of TN octave (8va) signs?  My plan is to have the app “scroll” the staff by just changing the octave number (currently not in the beta version). 

 

In conclusion

Again, thanks so much for your time and energy on this topic.  Maybe we’ve wysi-whyp’d it to death.  But I am more than happy to continue the dialog if you have further thoughts.

There are a couple of things I would like to say via email (the one listed on your website). 

Stuart

[J R Freestone]

Hi Stuart,

I'm not a fan of google groups, and yes it would be good to have a chat by email. A few bits here for now anyway:

Re wysiwyp promotion, I think the best route is probably flooding social media with regular offerings on youtube, facebook, twitter, etc., or through teaching music directly to students using the method. But sure, SEO will help. I'm not sure if academia will be interested, but maybe somewhere you might have luck. What do I know?!

I tried your web-based MusicXML loader, which worked absolutely fine! I've not downloaded the Android app yet, but I've not got much in the way of devices other than a phone and my Windows laptop.

In my own experiments I wasn't deliberately running through all - or any of - the other ideas out there. I simply thought about solutions to the problem, come up with something, given it a try, chucked it out as garbage, learned a bit, rinsed and repeated! Sometimes it's a tweak, sometimes it's a completely different angle, like going from a handwriting focus to app-based, but it always comes from a position of my own creativity, as you did - though influenced by seeing other ones, of course.

I'm hesitantly excited about my latest staff idea, and it was thanks to your encouragement to write a program. I wasn't motivated by transcribing scores to my notation, because I didn't have a notation yet and because my TN reading isn't too bad for the stuff I want to play as yet. I started writing a new program to try different staff and note designs, which made it easier to plug in the variables. I'll tell you more in an email soon.

Since you've imported whole pieces, you will have done some of the more advanced road-testing of your system, actually reading from it. I'll have to figure something out to do that in mine, maybe quicker than learning how to use MusicXML or midi files? I might be able to find some simple ASCII transcriptions that I'll find easier to parse.

Yeah, it's great we both thought of the same / similar ideas for the shading and dynamics, staccato, etc. As you say, the staccato might be a user preference, and wysiwyp composers could indicate exactly how staccato their staccato should be! It probably is just because the TN notation would be a pain in the backside that it hasn't been written as short notes and rests already!

Another little brainwave came to me just now about the problem of screen-device displays not being easy to move on at the end of the page. This has probably been implemented in some apps already, but I realised a foot-pedal might be useful, then that it would be simpler with a camera and some clear head nod or other gesture, and then - d'oh! - with increasing intelligence of AI, the app can be listening to you play and "turn" the page, as well as applaud at the end, and give you a score or tips on better technique. I think some of them are already there, or near it, but I've not tried any of the Synthesia-type things. Given that it takes my tuners (an app and a dedicated gizmo) a second or so to register a single note, and often gets it wrong, I don't see how they can be much good at following a score as you play, but maybe.

I hadn't really thought about that issue of big octave stretches. Your solution seems like a good one.

Anyway, it looks like we're both thinking it might be useful to email privately, so maybe that's enough for now on here. I think the email is the same on here as on my website. The visible part on here is truncated, but if you have subscribed, you can just Reply to an email in your inbox (as opposed to Reply to List) and it'll put the full address in the "To:" control of the email. It still looks weird, because the name part is still the truncated version. Google...pffff...their web interfaces are horrendous.

See you on email, mate,
John

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/musicnotation/10721c94-118b-4e5a-b8c9-871cf574aa55n%40googlegroups.com.

[Stephen Pollard]

Hi All,

I love the conversations! I'm going to reply primarily to the initial post.

Is there one "best" car for everyone?  One "best" ice cream flavor?  People have different needs and preferences.

I totally agree with this. We've discussed so many alternative notations in this group, but I haven't seen very much discussion of all the notations that already exist and what they are useful for. I believe that notations are tools, and usually we don't invent tools then see what we can do with them - often we invent or refine tools for specific purposes. We can see this just by looking around at the notations that exist already - Traditional for classical music, lead sheets for simpler songs, chord charts, tabs, etc. I think it would be beneficial to look around and write down which notations (including but not limited to traditional) are actively being used and for what purposes. I bet we will see that the notation fits the need (more or less).

I agree that it is unlikely that there will be a single general notation that will be optimal for every situation. The needs of a song writer sketching out a melody are very different from a full score composer with a full orchestra of instruments, and therefore the notation used in those situations will be different.

Given that many different kinds of notations will continue to be used, I like the idea of an app that can translate among different notations. So far as I know, MusicXML seems fine to encode the music. Lilypond would work as well for most music. So long as the notation can record note pitch and duration, it'll work. As for the other kind of file that defines the music notation, I found the Lilypond language to be flexible enough when I was creating the solfege staff.  Every music notation language will be limited (again, each language is a tool for a specific purpose, not general), but I found Lilypond to be good enough for encoding the music notation. Granted, the solfege staff is very similar to traditional notation, so I have no experience trying to implement a more different notation in Lilypond.

I haven't seen exactly how people are encoding their alternative notations, but I would be willing to help out people with the Lilypond format. I think creating a new language for encoding music notations would be time consuming compared to using a format that already exists.

I personally would start with a webapp similar to your SNapp, and allow choosing which notation to output to. I could see easily setting up a server that converts from musicXML to lilypond, then runs Lilypond (since there already is a lilypond file that defines many alternative notations) selecting the requested music notation, then returns the converted music. You'd have to use a Google cloud compute server or Amazon EC2 instance instead of a Heroku app or Google app engine, because you'd have to run lilypond as well. I may hack together a quick app on my home server to do exactly this!

Stephen

[stuar...@gmail.com]

Stephen,

Sorry to be so late in responding to your post, but I have been taking a break from the alternative notation “biz”.

I really appreciate your comments regarding automation of sheet music from MusicXML.  And I think your idea of a client/server solution for a Lilypond implementation is great.  I’m wondering if you have in fact “hacked together a quick app” as a proof of concept.  If so, I’d be very interested to hear what you have done, and learned.  I think automation is crucial as I suspect most folks don’t have the time and patience to create .ly files manually for their sheet music inventory.  It may also be important for those who are shopping around for AN’s that meets their needs, not to mention the AN designers who would like to quickly see their designs implemented during the development process.

Stuart

[Paul Morris]

Hi all,

In case some folks aren't aware of this.  LilyBin is an open-source web app for LilyPond.  http://lilybin.com/

I created a version of LilyBin that supports Clairnote music notation systems, building on the work I've done getting LilyPond to produce Clairnote:

https://lilybin.clairnote.org/

https://clairnote.org/software/

See also the newer https://www.hacklily.org/ which offers MusicXML import (using the conversion script that ships with LilyPond). 

If I had infinite time I would make a version of hacklily that supports Clairnote (to replace LilyBin + Clairnote).

-Paul

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[Stephen Pollard]

Hey Paul,

Your setup with lily lilybin+clarinote looks great!

Do you think you'd be able to set up the exact same thing but instead of only allowing clarinote.ly to be imported, allow the MNP-scripts.ly to be imported as well? Then one could select any notation from all those alternative notations.

Here's the link to the MNP-scripts http://musicnotation.org/wiki/software-wiki/lilypond/

Or perhaps it would be easiest to simply add the MNP-scripts.ly to your already running instance of lilybin+clarinote.

Also, how did you set up your own running version of LilyBin? Did you use an online tutorial? It could save me hours of work setting up something similar.

Stephen

[stuar...@gmail.com]

Paul and Stephen,

All of this is really good stuff!  If there continues to be a discussion on this topic, I suggest a new forum conversation be opened (with an appropriate name of course) so it can be found in the future.

I think this is really good news for the AN community.

Stuart