music resources
Christopher T King
squirrel at WPI.EDU
Tue Aug 17 08:58:03 EDT 2004
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.
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