Re: Expressive Notation Package (ENP)

[Mika Kuuskankare]

Dear all,
 
I thought I'd chime in since I'm the author of the program discussed in this 
thread.

I started to work with ENP already in the early 90's. The idea at the time was 
to update the music notational capabilities of a visual programming language 
called PatchWork. So, ENP, at first, existed as a PW user-library. Together 
with my colleague Mikael Laurson we started in the late 90's to work on a 
successor of PW, called PWGL.

Currently, ENP exists as an integral part of PWGL. Since 2006, PWGL has been 
publicly available free of charge. PWGL--along with ENP--is hardly commercial 
let alone mainstream. For those who do not know this, our "company" the 
Sibelius Academy is Finland's national university of music.

The primary focus of ENP is in compositional and music analytical applications 
and in virtual instrument control. Typesetting music is not the primary aim of 
ENP although it is designed to produce automatic, reasonable musical 
typesetting. Furthermore, unlike lilypond, ENP has a GUI and it is not by 
default text based, although the scores can be represented in a Lisp(y) format 
which, in turn, allows us to manipulate and generate music in a visual patch. 
We also use ENP to control several physical instrument models we have 
developed, examples of which can be found in our home page... so, all in all I 
think the goals of lilypond and ENP are somewhat different.

I wouldn't say that lilypond was the inspiration for ENP and ENP certainly does 
not use lilypond to do the typesetting. Nevertheless, I have the deepest 
respect towards lilypond and towards its creators and maintainers as I know 
from personal experience how difficult this kind of software can be.
ENP can (or could at least) export to lilypond through a tool called FOMUS 
conceived by a fellow named David Psenicka. For my personal compositional 
projects I have created a more 'native' tool that can do all kinds of tricks 
thanks to lilypond and its LaTeX inherited goodness :) ... and yes, I'm a big 
fan of LaTeX also.

Still, at the end of the day I'm more of a casual user of lilypond. I've 
subscribed to this list for a short while now but I've already gotten help from 
some of you and find that to be one of the wonderful thing about lilypond.

So, there should be no competition between ENP and lilypond. I've followed the 
development of lilypond with great interest and I wish it well but I believe 
our objectives will remain different.

In any case, I want to take this opportunity to wish all the best to all the 
lilypond users!


Dr. Mika Kuuskankare
Composer, programmer and researcher
www.siba.fi/PWGL


On 27.4.2010, at 16:54, Graham Percival wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 02:56:53PM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
>> Kuuskankare, M (2009) ENP: a system for contemporary music notation.
>> Contemporary Music Review 28(2): 221--235
>> http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460903322505
> 
> That's not new -- or rather, that's just the latest version.
> There's published papers about it in 2006, 2004, 2001, and
> possibly earlier.
> 
>> But it's interesting to see that Lilypond is proving influential among
>> the mainstream commercial notation software providers ...
> 
> There's somewhere between 20 and 50 papers that cite lilypond;
> just do a google scholar search for "lilypond music" or something
> like that.  Many of them are merely using lilypond to generate
> output for their music transcription programs, but there's also
> things like "perllilypond" that specifically translates from one
> data format (humdrum) into lilypond format.
> 
> I'm somewhat annoyed that almost none of these projects get in
> touch with us (especially the filetype conversion ones!), but oh
> well.  The new website will have a place for academic papers
> citing lilypond, so hopefully if researchers see that list and
> notice that their paper(s) is missing, they'll get in touch.
> 
> Cheers,
> - Graham
> 
> 
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