Re: ideas for Google Summer of Code

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 04:24:36PM +0800, Graham Breed wrote:
> David Kastrup wrote:
>> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
>>   
>> It could be argued that some sort of Prolog-like system of specifying
>> limitations might be more natural.  Or a TeX-like system of specifying
>> penalties for certain transitions and mappings, and let the system then
>> find the shortest matching graph across (with hard-specified fingerings
>> serving as hard constraints, obviously).
>>   
> Ah, constraints then.  Something like Strasheela
>
> http://strasheela.sourceforge.net/strasheela/doc/index.html
>
> It's for music theory rather than instrumental constraints but I expect  
> there's a lot of overlap.  It already outputs Lilypond.  I know very  
> little about it or the language it's written in -- Oz.  It's one of the  
> interesting things I may look at one day though.

Ah, Strasheela.  The first half of the tutorial was rewritten by a
certain well-known open-source documentation guru.  ;)

I used it in my Master's thesis to create exercises of varying
difficulty levels for rhythms and violin intonation.  I'll
probably return to it during my PhD, but that's still a few months
off.  Having distinct difficulty levels (ie "violinist with 2
weeks of experience; violinist with 6 weeks of experience;
violinist with 4 years of experience") is somewhat distinct from
the original problem of checking whether it's possible on an
instrument, of course.

I still can't see this being useful in a cost/benefit decision,
though.  It would take a lot of work to implement such a system.
I could well imagine it being a PhD on its own.  Depending on the
scope, of course.

Cheers,
- Graham