Automatically realize figured bass

[Malte Meyn]

Hi everybody,

a few weeks ago my father asked me whether there is a tool that 
automatically realizes figured bass (I think you say “realize” for the 
act of composing the right hand accompaniment, don’t you?). I didn’t 
know such a tool, so I wrote a simple one in Haskell but this wasn’t 
clever enough (worked only under certain preconditions, used 
backtracking instead of something faster, didn’t weight solutions by 
their “goodness”, etc.). But now I have several ideas how to improve 
such a tool (represent chords as vertices in a graph, edges are weighted 
(unison/octave parallels get a very high score etc.), then find the best 
solution using the Dijsktra or Bellman-Ford wayfinding algorithm, …).

I don’t know whether such a tool could be implemented in LilyPond itself 
(as an engraver?) or it would be better to write a separate program 
(like lilypond-book/musicxml2ly/…). In the latter case, I think we would 
be relatively free in the choice of a programming language ;)

The german LilyPond forum doesn’t seem to be very interested in such a 
project yet. But there are so many more LilyPonders “out there” ;) Would 
someone on this list be interested
• to use such a tool if someone implemented it?
• to implement such a tool? (knowledge of figured bass or a programming 
language would be good ;)
• Or is there already such a tool for LilyPond that I don’t know?

Cheers,
Malte