4 ms·

OMN: Scripting the whole language of traditional staff notation

46 points by geoffroy 11y ago

z3ugma 11y ago
Also worth a look is Lilypond http://www.lilypond.org/ http://www.lilypond.org/.
- rhizome 11y ago
  Do these really need a separate post? They're already in the existing one.
  - colomon 11y ago
    Where? I admit I haven't read the entire thing (as it got boring fast) but a search on a couple of the pages doesn't turn up the word Lilypond?
    - rhizome 11y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177996
saljam 11y ago
Does this have notation for quarter tones? I can't find that on their website. That's always been a pain point for me. No quarter tone notation rules out a lot, including most of Arabic and Turkish, and much of Greek maqam music.
- colomon 11y ago
  Dunno about OMN, but Lilypond seems to have quarter tone support: http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation-big-page.html#accidentals http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation-big... (third staff down)
a-nikolaev 11y ago
Just a sidenote that the Opusmodus software is not open source, not free, and works only on Mac.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
It would be easy enough to write a parser for this. Interesting that they see it as a way to freeform new compositional ideas. Over the years I've tried a huge selection of music composition software. I've yet to find something that's both easy and composable. It may be, just like the CLI/GUI discussion -- plain text may win out over a lot of mousing around and clicking.
kregasaurusrex 11y ago
What information does OMN contained that isn't preserved in sheet music already? I was looking at OCR tools a few months back and found OpenOMR which expresses the MIDI instruction with all of these properties.
knz42 11y ago
There's a conceptual issue with the language and a missing example: what of chords where one part of the chord is pressed longer than another? Or when one part must be staccato and another not? I can't seem to see how this is expressed with OMN.
djfm 11y ago
Very cool! Looking forward to experiment with it. In the same spirit but less advanced (my "language" has bugs, I know) I wrote this toy project: http://sound-of-ascii.herokuapp.com/ http://sound-of-ascii.herokuapp.com/. There's a demo and you can play around with it.
byteCoder 11y ago
Looking at their score example at the bottom of the page, the right-hand score is defined as a separate entity from the left-hand score. As a result, to the OMN notation reader, it's hard to see the inherent synchrony between the two hands. This would be a bitch to debug and compose (i.e., code) without its display on a standard staff, which would show the time-ordered parallelism directly.

46 points by geoffroy 11y ago

z3ugma 11y ago

Also worth a look is Lilypond http://www.lilypond.org/ http://www.lilypond.org/.

rhizome 11y ago
Do these really need a separate post? They're already in the existing one.
- colomon 11y ago
  Where? I admit I haven't read the entire thing (as it got boring fast) but a search on a couple of the pages doesn't turn up the word Lilypond?
  - rhizome 11y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177996

saljam 11y ago

Does this have notation for quarter tones? I can't find that on their website. That's always been a pain point for me. No quarter tone notation rules out a lot, including most of Arabic and Turkish, and much of Greek maqam music.

colomon 11y ago
Dunno about OMN, but Lilypond seems to have quarter tone support: http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation-big-page.html#accidentals http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation-big... (third staff down)

a-nikolaev 11y ago

Just a sidenote that the Opusmodus software is not open source, not free, and works only on Mac.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

It would be easy enough to write a parser for this. Interesting that they see it as a way to freeform new compositional ideas. Over the years I've tried a huge selection of music composition software. I've yet to find something that's both easy and composable. It may be, just like the CLI/GUI discussion -- plain text may win out over a lot of mousing around and clicking.

kregasaurusrex 11y ago

What information does OMN contained that isn't preserved in sheet music already? I was looking at OCR tools a few months back and found OpenOMR which expresses the MIDI instruction with all of these properties.

knz42 11y ago

There's a conceptual issue with the language and a missing example: what of chords where one part of the chord is pressed longer than another? Or when one part must be staccato and another not? I can't seem to see how this is expressed with OMN.

djfm 11y ago

Very cool! Looking forward to experiment with it. In the same spirit but less advanced (my "language" has bugs, I know) I wrote this toy project: http://sound-of-ascii.herokuapp.com/ http://sound-of-ascii.herokuapp.com/. There's a demo and you can play around with it.

byteCoder 11y ago

Looking at their score example at the bottom of the page, the right-hand score is defined as a separate entity from the left-hand score. As a result, to the OMN notation reader, it's hard to see the inherent synchrony between the two hands. This would be a bitch to debug and compose (i.e., code) without its display on a standard staff, which would show the time-ordered parallelism directly.