feature request

feature request

[42 147]

Org-mode has proven tremendously useful in writing musical analyses, but
it would also be nice to provide musical examples in plain text.

Is there anything like this available? If not, I may try to do it
myself. I'm finally getting my act together and finishing the Emacs Lisp
Intro; but any help pointing me to the right examples, or the right
conceptual frameworks would be much appreciate.

Here is more or less what I would want:

----------
----------
----------
----------
----------

Pretend that is the staff. The user places the cursor on the staff, and
therefore enters "note entry mode." The "note-entry" function is passed
three args: one for the note, two for the rhythmic value. So if the user
presses "F," "F" is passed as the first argument; if the user enters
"8", "8" is passed as the second argument; if the user enters ".", "."
is passed as the third argument.

This produces a dotted 8th F note on the staff. The third argument is
optional (since not all rhythmic values are dotted), and its value is
nil by default.

Anyway, that is a draft of what I would want. May already exist with
slightly different functionality.

Re: feature request

[Christian Moe]

42 147 writes:

> Org-mode has proven tremendously useful in writing musical analyses, but
> it would also be nice to provide musical examples in plain text.
>
> Is there anything like this available?

Yes. Org-Babel supports Lilypond. It's magic.

http://www.lilypond.org/
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-lilypond.html

Yours,
Christian

Re: feature request

[François Pinard]

Christian Moe <mail@christianmoe.com> writes:

> 42 147 writes:

>> Is there anything like this available?

> Yes. Org-Babel supports Lilypond. It's magic.

> http://www.lilypond.org/
> http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-lilypond.html

Somewhere in my old files, I have a reference to an Emacs mode for
entering music visually in a kind of ASCII mode, written by Neil Jerram
if I remember correctly.  But this was before Han-Wen and Jan wrote
Lilypond.  Now that Lilypond exists, it is an immensely more interesting
avenue, in my opinion.  Neil code would be fairly oldish anyway.

I never tried using both Org and Lilypond as suggested, but it looks
like a very appealing idea, I should try it.  Thanks for the suggestion.

François

Re: feature request

[Michael Brand]

Hi François

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 6:29 PM, François Pinard
<pinard@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> Somewhere in my old files, I have a reference to an Emacs mode for
> entering music visually in a kind of ASCII mode, written by Neil Jerram
> if I remember correctly.

I am very curios to see how this looked like and how it worked. With a
quick search I was not able to find it.

Michael

Re: feature request (rather off-topic)

[François Pinard]

Michael Brand <michael.ch.brand@gmail.com> writes:
> François Pinard <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

>> Somewhere in my old files, I have a reference to an Emacs mode for
>> entering music visually in a kind of ASCII mode, written by Neil
>> Jerram if I remember correctly.

> I am very curios to see how this looked like and how it worked.  With
> a quick search I was not able to find it.

Hi, Michael.

I looked around a bit, and found not much in my files.  I cleaned up the
GNU Music project many, many years ago and did not keep much of it.
Even the Emacs mode (written by Neil Jerram unless I'm mistaken) did not
survive for long in the project, as we (Neil included) selected another
representation for music, still kind of 2-dimensional, but more
compactly coded than an ASCII drawing.  To edit this representation,
instead of Emacs, we wrote a specialized curses-based program.  I
surprisingly still have scanner.l, parser.y, editor.c, and a few other
files from that project, but really, this is of no interest nowadays.
In my opinion, Lilypond is immensely more appealing!

It seems that Neil Jerram, which sadly, I did not contact in ages,
remained active in the Emacs communities, you should easily find him
here and there by Googling.  I see Neil Jerram <nj104@cus.cam.ac.uk> in
http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/musictools/src/lilypond-2.6.3/AUTHORS.txt,
but while I think unlikely that this address is still valid, I do not
know.  You might try to reach him there or otherwise, if you are curious
enough: maybe that with some luck, he kept around some code or example?

Let me share that I remember Neil as one of the most exquisite persons I
ever worked with: it always has been a great pleasure.  The GNU Music
project underwent a long, dark episode when Richard Stallman forced a
new direction and leadership upon us, seduced at the times by the
promises of Robert Strandh, who brought the project into some moribund
state.  Han-Wen succeeded in getting the project back to life (I helped
my best), to convey what later became Lilypond.  Lilypond has been
successful to the point GNU Music is never heard anymore by that name,
and that's very OK: Lilypond goes much beyond our dreams and means. :-)

The Lilypond musical notation is quite efficient.  I often use it, with
a pen on a sheet of paper, in the need of noting some music for myself,
when away from home and any computer.  For me, it's quicker than drawing
staves and notes.  I quite suspect that Lilypond notation, combined with
the virtues of Babel, and the graphical capabilities of Emacs, might
really be the best way to handle musical scores with Org.

François

Re: feature request (rather off-topic)

[Michael Brand]

Hi François

Your post with the first-hand background about Lilypond is a very
interesting read for me, thank you.

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 5:13 AM, François Pinard
<pinard@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> but really, this is of no interest nowadays.
> In my opinion, Lilypond is immensely more appealing!

Agreed. I did not mention that to be productive I would certainly use
Lilypond, preferably in Babel source blocks and for smaller scores
together with Org inline images.

Still I have some theoretical interest in 2-dimensional (time and
pitch) score notation in plain text (not the tablature that is
specific to an instrument). Maybe I will try to reach Neil to get an
impression of the now historical project.

> The Lilypond musical notation is quite efficient.  I often use it, with
> a pen on a sheet of paper, in the need of noting some music for myself,
> when away from home and any computer.  For me, it's quicker than drawing
> staves and notes.

Particularly interesting, I will have to remember that.

Michael