Re: Contemporary notation (Re: GSoC projects list)

[Jürgen Reuter]

   Hi all,

   personally, I think, it is as always in software development that
   addresses a wide audience: the challenge to find an appropriate level
   of abstraction.
   If you want to support *any* kind of notation, then just use a painting
   or CAD software.  Obviously, you do not want to do that, because you
   will loose any musical semantics, including the possibility of
   reformatting, transposing, or whatever else musicologically editing you
   would like to apply.

   On the other extreme, you would focus on a specialized notation system
   that addresses a selected audience only and is of little or no value
   for other users.

   A common approach is solve this dilemma is to:

   * (1) Focus on a selected set of specialized features that you expect
   to be useful for many users.  Then you can add specialized automation.
   For example, the abstraction of having objects called "notes" that have
   a particular property called "pitch" enables you to group a selection
   of notes into a "music expression" and "transpose" the whole expression
   by altering the pitch of each note in that group.

   * (2) For exceptional cases, provide more lower-level features, that
   provide less automation due to an increasing lack of musical semantics,
   but are more flexible.  For example, LilyPonds feature to embed
   postscript snippets is extremely flexible.  But it is just graphics,
   without any musicological sementics.  And as such, you can not impose
   any musical operation on it.

   Having this approach in mind, I implemented the cluster engraver
   roughly 15 years ago.  Urs, you mentioned creating "notation that
   behaves like a glissando, i.e. any drawn connection between two
   notes."  With the cluster engraver, you (sort of) can do such a thing.
   The idea was to provide graphical notation that builds upon musical
   expressions by transforming that musical information into a
   corresponding graphical shape.  This way, the cluster engraver fills
   the gap between non-graphical (and therefore specialized) standard
   notation on the one hand and generic, but non-musical low-level
   graphics on the other.  Maybe the cluster engraver would be a proper
   starting point for more music expression based graphical notation?

   Another thing, I guess, is making it easy for musicians without
   programming knowledge to smoothly embed their own articulation signs,
   note heads, clefs, and other font symbols into LilyPond at runtime:
   Just define a new articulation sign or note head shape or clef at the
   top of your .ly file with a single short line of scheme code that
   references some, say, .eps file.  I think, this is still not that
   easily possible, right?  (Please correct me, if I am wrong.)

   Personally, I am even not sure of how to properly notate contemporary
   music.  Yes, I have seen e.g. excerpts of Stockhausen's score of his
   Studie II, and Wehinger's aural score of Ligeti's Artikulation, as well
   as a score of Kagel.  (LilyPond's short, long and very long fermata
   signs were actually inspired by this score of Kagel.) Still, I am not
   satisfied with such notation: At least to my perception, it typically
   does not represent well essential nuances of e.g. electronic sounds.

   Probably most important, I think you first of all need lots of examples
   to get a sense for what might classify as candidate for an appropriate
   abstraction: Is it all about graphical notation?  Or rather use of
   individual / personalized font symbols?  What else is useful?  In fact,
   classification by having seen lots of examples is one of our brain's
   fundamental approaches for recognition...

   Best wishes,
   Jürgen