Re: Randomness in layout

[Sharon Rosner]

Hi all and thanks for your replies,

I’d just like to clarify that my intention is not to undo the excellent music 
setting capabilities of lilypond, but rather to introduce a tiny amount of 
irregularity, or “grain”, in order to try to reproduce that feel that you get 
in old editions, or even neat manuscripts.

Based on the code suggested by Malte Meyn, I put together the following:

\version "2.19.23"

\relative { 
  \override Slur.eccentricity = #(lambda (grob) (* 0.05 (random:normal)))
  \override Slur.height-limit = #(lambda (grob) (+ 2.8 (* 0.2 (random:normal))))
  \override Slur.thickness = #(lambda (grob) (+ 2.85 (* 0.1 (random:normal))))
  \override Slur.ratio = #(lambda(grob) (+ 0.3 (* 0.05 (random:normal))))

  c'2( d) 
  c( d)
  c( d)
  c( d)
  c( d)
  c( d)
  c( d)
  c( d)
  c( d)
}

To give a sense of how it looks like with actual music, I enclose an excerpt 
from something I’m currently working on (with similar settings for ties in 
addition to slurs), a Bach aria. As you can see, the effect is really minimal 
(showing it to my wife who’s a professional musician, she couldn’t really tell 
what was going on).

Sharon

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> On 21 Aug 2015, at 13:39, Andrew Bernard <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hello Sharon,
> 
> 
> 
> This opens up a topic of deep interest. I would have to say, as somebody 
> earnestly trying to come to terms with serious lilypond programming and the 
> scheme interfaces, you would be better off buying a dozen HB pencils. but all 
> joking aside, the beauty of tools like lilypond is the supreme precision and 
> accuracy of the layout and output (except maybe for ties!), which handwriting 
> has trouble achieving, and even copper engravers struggle with all their 
> lives. To then ask a program that has been tuned for a high degrees of 
> perfection to output sloppy work is something of a contradiction.
> 
> But I understand the desire for this concept. Many digital media can be cold, 
> clinical, and remote. This applies to audio, photography, and especially 
> typography. To add back the human warmth we crave, audio engineers regularly 
> place valve microphones and preamps into the chain, photographers use any 
> number of photoshop filters to lessen the coldness of the raw image, and so 
> on. Typography in the digital realm is harder to warm up, but there are fonts 
> now with a couple of dozen irregular variants of each letter glyph, even with 
> slightly wobbly baselines, which you can use to make the work look more hand 
> typeset, or older looking. I don’t know of any applications that can handle 
> this juggling programmatically yet, but in principle it is not difficult.
> 
> It’s of particular interest to me presently because the composer whose work I 
> am setting has spent a lifetime refining a particularly idiosyncratic 
> handwriting at his drawing board, and insists that I make lilypond look the 
> same, exactly. He is not accepting of engraved music at all. [It’s New 
> Complexity School Musci, which is hardly ever engraveable at all - think 
> Ferneyhough.] The fact that I have been able to develop a style sheet 
> including lovely custom noteheads in lilypond that almost satisfies this 
> desire for a handwritten look is testimony to what can be done.
> 
> However, there is a can containing wriggling worms opening here. If you make 
> nice randomly irregularised slurs, then with all the rest of lilypond output 
> being highly controlled, in my opinion at least, it will look half baked, or 
> just plain strange, and unless for private consumption only, many people may 
> find it just wrong or defective. You need to go the whole way and start 
> making irregular noteheads and stems and so on. There is an LSR snippet I 
> think about handwritten looking noteheads. One of the main things about hand 
> drawn scores is the irregular staff lines - certainly what gives a lot of 18C 
> MSS their visual appeal.
> 
> You can output scores in SVG format and alter them in InkScape. You could 
> happily jiggle note positions of the staff lines and all sorts of terrible 
> things, to your heart’s content!
> 
> I am sorry this is not the technical answer you require, but part of your 
> answer is that lilypond can't irregularise (I am going to make this a new 
> word) scores, out of the box, as it stands now.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> 
> 
> On 21/08/2015 18:13, "Sharon Rosner" <address@hidden on behalf of 
> address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I have a question that is both general and specific. Is there a way to 
>> automatically introduce a bit of randomness into the way different objects 
>> are layed-out in Lilypond? Specifically, I’m trying to find a way to make 
>> slurs look more “hand-drawn” by slightly changing eccentricity, thickness, 
>> ratio etc for each slur, in an automatic manner.
>> 
>