Evolution of thought on composing with Lily

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> why are you embedding a two
> dimensional thing like a musical score in a one dimensional thing
> like a text file?

There is nothing else. Two dimensional representations still have to
be serialized when written to disk, and in that stage there is plenty
of room for creating incompatibilities and inconsistencies, especially
if you're heavily developing the program that both reads and writes
the data.

This discussions made my head spin a little with ideas. One way to
make a combined GUI/command editor, is to hook up the backend with X,
and do on-demand rendering of parts of music: If the format of the
music satisfies some basic constraints (eg. measure synchronisation so
the entire score is not changed when a single note is inserted), it
might be possible to just take a snippet of LilyPond input from
halfway the piece, and render it to screen in a short timespan. If you
would have a structure editor to edit the snippets, you could make
rendering the input almost real-time.

(Now, if someone would want to pay my salary for a year or two ...
:-)


-- 

Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden    | http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/