Re: struggling to get horizontal space on the page exactly proportional to time

[David Kastrup]

Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@gmail.com> writes:

> Sheet music I've seen doesn't seem to care even a little bit how wide
> the bars are, or whether different lines align vertically or not, its
> maybe just not something lilypond does, because its not how sheet
> music is typeset?

When multiple voices are playing at the same time, simultaneously
sounding notes are vertically aligned.  You want to align between
multiple lines that occur at different times, at the cost of sensible
typesetting.

That's similar to demanding that poetry has to have multiple lines with
syllables in the same metric position of different verses horizontally
aligned.  That would make actually reading the poem harder, not easier.
In a similar way, interfering with the natural flow of music symbols in
a manner as rigid as that would make reading music harder.

Text processing programs don't really offer to do that kind of
alignment of poems, and LilyPond doesn't reall offer to do that reliably
with music.

> Musicians just can hear in their head how the pattern repeats, even
> though its quite hard (for me) to see it on the page?

There are "piano roll" notations that are quite closer to the execution
than standard music notation.  They make it easier to act out music and
harder to read and reason about music and change it on the fly.  Like
phonetic scripts for languages, they haven't really caught on
significantly in spite of having a small fan base.

-- 
David Kastrup