[Denemo-devel] LinuxMusiciansForum[User:Raboof] An idea about structured notation/composing and references/links in notation

[Nils Gey]

The following comes from the user "Raboof" from the LinuxMusiciansForum. He 
wanted to create a new notation editor, but I said maybe I know a place where 
innovative ideas gather...
I think its a good start to have references and links... If you write something 
with a "Refrain" this could just be a reference to the first refrain. You could 
even "hide" the redundant parts and just place something like "16 measures 
REFRAIN [1-16]".


Original Text:

One thing that has always irked me about the popular notation editors is that a 
lot of the 'structure' of your song gets lost: when notes are copy-pasted 
(common in pop music :) ), their relationship is not recorded.

In programmers' terms, this violates the "don't repeat yourself" mantra, and 
like when programming, it is error-prone and makes your score less 
maintainable. The one `notation editor' that is of help here is Lilypond, but 
editing Lilypond by hand is rather cumbersome, and most frontends either don't 
support these features or don't present enough guidance to use them effectively.

I'm exploring the idea of building up a score out of 'fragments', where each 
'fragment' might appear many times in a composition, sometimes 'processed' 
(merged with other fragments, transposed, etc). The main point is when you 
modify a fragment, this affects all locations in the song where the fragment is 
(directly or indirectly) used.

I mocked up a small example to demonstrate how a simple 12-bar accompaniment 
can be built up by applying some simple operations (transposition, merging, 
repetition and concatenation) on a 2-bar fragment.

http://arnout.engelen.eu/files/dev/linuxmusicians/arranger-mockup.png

When you'd now alter the 2-bar fragment at the bottom, the entire 12-bar block 
should change accordingly.

This mockup serves only to show the general idea: the rendered notes aren't 
quite right and it doesn't show what the UI to interact with such a piece 
should look like. More on that later :).