music resources

[Christopher T King]

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Elaine Jackson wrote:

> Is there such a thing as an executable language for music?

Yes.  Lilypond [http://www.lilypond.org/web/] is a music typesetting 
language that provides beautiful (i.e. much better than Finale or 
what-have-you) PDF/PS output, MIDI output, and HTML/info/what-have-you 
integration.

> Naturally the ideal thing would be if such a language were implemented
> within python, but I would be willing to learn a lesser programming
> language if I had a reasonable assurance that it had what I'm looking
> for.

Lilypond is a mix of Scheme, TeX, and its own native language.  Scheme 
certainly is not a 'lesser' language, while TeX is a very powerful macro 
language.  Though you don't need to know either of them to write Lilypond 
programs, it helps to do advanced stuff.

A short Lilypond snippet:

e8 d c d e e e r | d d d r e g g r | e d c d e e e e | d d e d c4 r |

where '|' is a barline, 8 and 4 are note lengths (which are inherited by 
subsequent notes), and r is a rest.