Re: Randomness in layout

[Andrew Bernard]

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.
>