A question of rendering multiple instances of \arpeggio in MIDI

[Petr Pařízek]

Hello,

originally I wanted to ask two questions but I'll leave my second
question for a different thread so that the two topics don't get mixed up.
I currently use LilyPond 2.22 on my Windows machine.
Via simple web search, I was trying to find some info on the possibility
of rendering arpeggios in MIDI files. What I found was an older
discussion (I don't remember the URL) from which it seemed to me that
such a feature was actually not planned to be implemented, even though
many other kinds of performance markings could be rendered in the MIDI
file via the "articulate" script.
My question is: Is my understanding correct that implementing such a
feature would, in one way or another, be troublesome and that doing so
is not considered a good idea? Or is the reason something else?
I'm asking because I can name at least 4 different ways in which this
feature would help me tremendously:
- 1) I'm blind. Therefore, if I want to make sheet music available to
other people, MIDI files are the one and only way I can locate typos in
my .ly file (an invaluable feature, numerous times has it helped me spot
really serious errors in my input text!). If I could render the
arpeggios in the MIDI file similarly to rendering ornamentation or
accents or other stuff, I could then easily check whether I have indeed
used a \arpeggio at the particular spot or not.
- 2) If this were possible, I wouldn't have to manually turn all the
arpeggios into written-out notes while repeatedly switching
\tieWaitForNote on and off. Doing something like this is time-consuming
even for one single arpeggio because it can't easily be automated.
Therefore if my score contains more than 30 of them, I don't even try to
imagine how much time it would take. And I may easily forget to do that
at one spot if there are so many of them. In contrast, introducing a
dedicated feature might allow me to just enclose the whole portion into
braces.
- 3) If I ever wanted to turn my modified .ly file back to one that's
more appropriate for printing, I would just remove the dedicated command
and the braces and leave the music fragment unchanged.
- 4) If I have good-quality samples available for playing back the MIDI
file, then the MIDI file can serve as a handy tool not just for spotting
errors but also for making serious recordings. For a blind person, this
is an important point because currently there doesn't seem to be any
other software that would A) run under Windows, B) use some syntax whose
verbosity is minimal, and C) make meaningful MIDI files. I mean, well,
there's Scala, but Scala's "sequence" format is much much more verbose
than what LilyPond offers. And what's more, I think I've read somewhere
in the documentation that LilyPond even allows me to include a series of
controller messages in my MIDI file, which can definitely make the
resulting performance sound a lot better still.

Thank you in advance for your answers or comments.

Petr


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