On Thursday, 26 March 1998, Will Self writes:
> One thing I have often thought is that there should be a completely
> independent page description language for music that could be used
> in completely different music typesetting programs.
This is surely one of the goals of the GNU Music Procject.
from the MANIFESTO:
o Describing a well-defined language for defining music.
We call this language (rather arrogantly) The Musical
Definition Language (mudela for short). GNU LilyPond
reads a mudela sourcefile and outputs a TeX file.
[...]
MUDELA
The design of Mudela has been (perfect past tense,
hopefully) an ongoing process, the most important criteria
being:
o define the (musical) message of the composer as
unambiguously as possible.
This means that, given a piece Mudela, it should be
possible for a program to play a reasonable
interpretation of the piece.
It also means that, given a piece of Mudela, it should
be possible for a program to print a score of the
piece.
o be intuitive, and easily readable (compared to, say,
Musi*TeX input, or MIDI :-),
o be easily writable in ASCII with a simple texteditor
Other considerations were (and will be):
o be able to edit the layout without danger of changing
the original music (Urtext),
o allow for adding different interpretations, again,
without danger of changing the original,
o easy to create a conductor's score, as well as the
scores for all individual instruments,
o provide simple musical manipulations, such as
(i) extracting a slice of music from a previously
defined piece, (ii) extracting only the rhythm from a
piece of music, (iii) transposing, etc.,
o easy to comprehend to both programmers and others.
One of the things that (might) be here would be: feasible
to use in a graphic editor. We don't have experience with
these beasts, so we don't know how to do this. Comments
appreciated.
> Is LilyPond such a thing? If so, I will be more excited and will
> probably start working on it!
LilyPond is one of those 'completely different' music typesetting
programs, that all use Mudela as their musical definition language.
If you're interested, you're free to join the GNU music discussion
list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Greetings,
Jan.
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | LilyPond - The GNU music typesetter
http://www.digicash.com/~jan | http://www.cs.ruu.nl/people/hanwen/lilypond
