MANIFESTO -- Rationale behind the GNU LilyPond project
HWN
and JCN
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1: Goals for LilyPond
GNU LilyPond was written with some considerations in mind:
Describing a well-defined language for defining music. We call
this language (rather arrogantly) The Musical Definition Language
(mudela for short). GNU LilyPond reads a mudela sourcefile and outputs a
TeX file.
Providing an easy-to-use interface for typesetting music in
its broadest sense. This interface should be intuitive from a musical
point of view. By broadest sense we mean: it is designed for music
printed left to right in staffs, using notes to designate rythm and
pitch.
Generating high-quality output. Ideally it should be of a professional
quality. We'd like to render Herbert Chlapiks words, "Fine music
setting is not possible without a knowledgeable printer," untrue.
Making a system which is fully tweakable. It should be possible to
typeset a book on how not to typeset music.
2: Development constraints
Further considerations while doing the programming
GNU LilyPond uses TeX for its output. This is not a key issue: in a
future version, GNU LilyPond might bypass TeX, but at the moment TeX
is convenient for producing output.
GNU LilyPond does not display notes directly, nor will it be rehacked
to be used interactively. GNU LilyPond writes output to a file. It
will not be extended to play music, or to recognize music.
GNU LilyPond is intended to run on Unix platforms, but it should
be portable to any platform which can run TeX and the GNU tools
GNU LilyPond is free. Commercial windows packages for setting music are
abundant. Free musicprinting software is scarce. For more thoughts on
this, please consult the gnu-music documentation.
GNU LilyPond is written in GNU C++. It will not be downgraded/ported to fit
broken systems.
3: Goals for mudela
The design of Mudela has been (perfect past tense, hopefully) an
ongoing process, the most important criteria being:
define the (musical) message of the composer as unambiguously as possible.
This means that, given a piece Mudela, it should be possible for a
program to play a reasonable interpretation of the piece.
It also means that, given a piece of Mudela, it should be possible for a
program to print a score of the piece.
be intuitive, and easily readable (compared to, say, Musi*TeX input,
or MIDI :-),
be easily writable in ASCII with a simple texteditor
Other considerations were (and will be):
be able to edit the layout without danger of changing the original
music (Urtext),
allow for adding different interpretations, again,
without danger of changing the original,
easy to create a conductor's score,
as well as the scores for all individual instruments,
provide simple musical manipulations, such as i extracting a
slice of music from a previously defined piece, ii extracting
only the rhythm from a piece of music, iii transposing, etc.,
easy to comprehend to both programmers and others.
One of the things that (might) be here would be: feasible to use in a
graphic editor. We don't have experience with these beasts, so we
don't know how to do this. Comments appreciated.
Musical pieces could be
Orchestral scores, (eg Mahler)
piano pieces (eg. Schubert, Rachmaninov),
pop songs (lyrics and chords),
Gregorian chants,
Bach multivoice organ pieces,
Short excerpts to be used in musicological publications.
Return to GNU LilyPond's home page.
Please send GNU LilyPond questions and comments to
gnu-music-discuss@gnu.org.
Please send comments on these web pages to
(address unknown),
send other FSF & GNU inquiries and questions to
gnu@gnu.org.
Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is
permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
This page was built from GNU LilyPond-1.1.57 by
root <(address unknown)>, at Tue Jul 13 11:30:28 1999 CDT.