6 ms·

“Compiling” Music

136 points by franek 5y ago

Aaargh20318 5y ago
Anyone else disappointed this is not about music meant to be played while compiling code ?
- polypodiopsi 5y ago
  Check out toplab.org for all things music-livecoding related. Tidalcycles which is haskellnased is one of the favorites of the scene but there are many options. Or one of the reccomendations in the thread here (esp. supercollider which is lisp based or c-sound for max renderingperformance stuff)
- Rochus 5y ago
  Have a look at https://chuck.stanford.edu/ https://chuck.stanford.edu/ or https://supercollider.github.io/ https://supercollider.github.io/.
- ciroduran 5y ago
  That's what https://musicforprogramming.net/ https://musicforprogramming.net/ is for
- franek 5y ago
  The title is indeed ambiguous. It could just as well refer to sound-coding systems/languages like Sonic Pi, or to what you imagined. (Which would be an oddly specific kind of music, but cool! The operation of a compiler turned into music, somehow?) That said, I am not disappointed. But then I am also the one who posted this link in the first place. I started using Lilypond last year for transcribing the melody voices from complex sheet music and automatically transposing them into different keys when needed (which is immensely useful). Just recently I discovered that it can also generate MIDI output, so in addition to having a convenient tool to get beautiful sheet music in whatever key I need, I can now easily have my computer play the melodies and memorise them by listening (which for me, on my current instrument, is much easier than playing from notes directly).
- severak_cz 5y ago
  check out https://alda.io/ https://alda.io/ - it takes some form of music notation and plays it using general MIDI synth
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  Not me. It’s nice and refreshing to see software that is about improving playing music for people rather than people saying “we’ve solved music with our new algorithm” (as if the thing to solve with music we’re somehow a singular aspect of the mechanics).
- leeter 5y ago
  I was more disappointed they didn't seem to have a "Make MIDI" option; or if they did I missed it.
  - Jackim 5y ago
    https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/creating-midi-output https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/creati...
- HPsquared 5y ago
  That, or music produced by a compiler to indicate its status.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    If a compiler comes with musak, will that reduce the complaints about slow compilation speeds?
Shugyousha 5y ago
I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw this. I always thought that lilypond was a WYSWYG for music sheets but it turned out that it's more a LaTex for music sheets which is what I prefer for typesetting text.
pdpi 5y ago
As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet music. She used one of the point-and-click scorewriters for a while (Sibelius maybe?) and was thorough displeased with both the output quality and the editing process itself. After some poking and prodding, and getting her to overcome the "but it's writing code!" barrier, she fell in love with how productive it is and still uses it, some 15 years later. It was pretty interesting to see somebody with no exposure to the software world develop their own habits and code style.
- franek 5y ago
  > As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. This deep care is documented in the "Essay on automated music engraving" in the Lilypond docs: http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/essay-big-page.html http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/essay-big-page.h... Previously discussed (I guess -- different title and dead link): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262
- jfk13 5y ago
  My wife is also a musician and music teacher, but I have not been able to persuade her to tackle Lilypond. (I have occasionally done projects in Lilypond for her, and the results are great, but the barrier to entry is too high for her to scale.) What she has found much more approachable is MuseScore (https://musescore.org/ https://musescore.org/). I haven't done a careful comparison of the output to see which scores better [sorry!], but it's certainly adequate for her everyday needs, and with a cheap midi keyboard as input device, it was remarkably easy to get started.
  - tasty_freeze 5y ago
flyinghamster 5y ago
If creating your scores in vimacs and then typing "make" isn't your cup of tea, there's Frescobaldi, essentially an IDE for Lilypond. https://frescobaldi.org/ https://frescobaldi.org/
samfriedman 5y ago
Lilypond helped me learn a lot of music theory I had missed in my learning to play piano; I use it to transcribe music now and it’s a fantastic piece of software (with fantastic docs!)
nlake906 5y ago
Interesting. Looks very similar to CSound score notation, with CSound being oriented towards rendering audio files, rather than printable documents. CSound is also FOSS, and has a sound generation side that is incredibly deep and detailed. https://csound.com/ https://csound.com/
roddux 5y ago
LaTeX for music? nice!
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  I came to LaTeX the other way around: Lilypond for text? Sign me up!
beepbooptheory 5y ago
Lilypond also has a guile API, and if you are not interested in the actual notation generation or at least how it looks, it can make some pretty weird and cool midi files. You can turn it into a kind of makeshift lisp Supercollider pattern generator.
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  That is really cool, I had a ton of fun playing with Overtone a few years ago (Clojure Supercollider wrapper). There's also Impromptu, which I think is Scheme... There's an incredibly cool talk by Andrew Sorensen using it: https://youtu.be/yY1FSsUV-8c https://youtu.be/yY1FSsUV-8c
- sramsay 5y ago
  Can you say a bit more about this? I know I can go look at the API, but I had no idea that it was capable of generating (?) MIDI files (I don't have cause to use Lilypond, really). Do you personally use it for generative music? Or something adjacent to that?
username223 5y ago
I'm happy to be reminded that Lilypond is still around. I used it to produce scores (and MIDIs) 15+ years ago, because it offered the same experience as LaTeX -- beautiful results if you're willing to code and, occasionally, battle eldritch horrors beneath its surface. Like (La)TeX and Emacs, I hope it becomes one of those rare pieces of software that lasts longer than a human lifetime. Few things we build these days, not just software, endure so long.
recursive 5y ago
More like compiling music notation, even though this is the original title.
- klyrs 5y ago
  In addition to the music engraver, you can also use lilypond to generate midi scores.
dang 5y ago
Related: Lyp – The Lilypond Swiss Army Knife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 - Dec 2016 (7 comments) LilyBin, an Online Musical Score Editor (using LilyPond) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414004 - April 2015 (1 comment) Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 - July 2010 (36 comments) Open source typesetter for sheet music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192289 - March 2010 (23 comments) LilyPond architecture (music notation software in Lisp) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379234 - Nov 2008 (2 comments)
aidenn0 5y ago
I love lilypond. My son plays the piano now and I make simplified arrangements of songs for him. He can pick out songs by ear and I'm teaching him to hand annotate first, because I don't know a better way to encourage familiarity with the notation, but I'll get him set up with lilypond eventually. There are various nicer IDEs for it, but I just run side-by-side windows with zathura and emacs; zathura will automatically reload when PDFs change on disk so I can see my changes immediately.
tunesmith 5y ago
Lilypond is freaking awesome. As a hobbyist with a music degree but unrelated career, I switched a while back, and it's saved me multiple times over just because of backwards compatibility and free software. My old version of Sibelius doesn't run on newer hardware, so some old scores I never ported are lost if I don't spend money just to export. But my old lilypond scores will always be fine.
softwarebeware 5y ago
Good thing "compiling" is in quotes. I don't think it actually meets the definition. It's more like "encoding."
Aidevah 5y ago
I've been using Lilypond for a number of years now and it's a truly remarkable piece of software. The quality of the engraving is extremely high, the amount of customization you can carry out is unrivalled, and it is also incredibly versatile. Out of the box it supports stuff ranging from Guitar and lute tablature[1] and notation specific to percussion[2] to modern chord names[3] and Baroque figured bass [4]. Did you know you can also use it to typeset neumes for Gregorian chant[5] and mensural notation[6]? Nevertheless I should mention that Lilypond serves a different purpose and is aimed at a different audience when compared to popular scorewriters such as musescore. It is primarily an engraver and should be used to typeset existing music, composing directly into it is always going to be very awkward compared to WYSIWYG editors or even just manuscript paper. The learning curve is also quite large and you must be ready to constantly refer back to its (very well written) documentation. But like any complex tool, acquiring familiarity with it is very rewarding in the long run. [1] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-notation-for-fretted-strings http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-... [2] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-notation-for-percussion http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-... [3] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/displaying-chords http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/display... [4] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/figured-bass http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/figured... [5] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typesetting-gregorian-chant http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset... [6] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typesetting-mensural-music http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset...
andrewzah 5y ago
I'm greatly thankful for the hard work put into lilypond and frescobaldi. I use lilypond to type up leadsheets for jazz and some other genres [0], inspired by Mark Veltzer's Openbook [1]. I've gotten pretty fast at typing up songs over time. The goal is to have a CLI or web interface to generate a pdf for concert/bb/bass clef/etc, optionally include lyrics/QR codes, and so on. Being able to transpose is quite handy, although I'm working on a system to automatically handle larger transpositions (e.g. for Eb instruments or for bass clef). The problem is if I statically pick one direction (up or down), some leadsheets will have the notes too high or low. I think I can resolve it with having all songs entered in absolute pitches and scanning for the lowest/highest note. 0: https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev 1: https://github.com/veltzer/openbook https://github.com/veltzer/openbook
lelandfe 5y ago
One of my family members is a music theory professor, here's what they had to say about this: > [Lilypond] was one of a handful of early programs turning notation into ASCII text. Older program but still useful. MusicXML has made a lot of these older systems less productive these days, though: https://www.musicxml.com/ https://www.musicxml.com/ > Developed by Michael Goode at Stanford – it's now the international standard for music encoding.

“Compiling” Music

136 points by franek 5y ago

Aaargh20318 5y ago

Anyone else disappointed this is not about music meant to be played while compiling code ?

polypodiopsi 5y ago
Check out toplab.org for all things music-livecoding related. Tidalcycles which is haskellnased is one of the favorites of the scene but there are many options. Or one of the reccomendations in the thread here (esp. supercollider which is lisp based or c-sound for max renderingperformance stuff)
Rochus 5y ago
Have a look at https://chuck.stanford.edu/ https://chuck.stanford.edu/ or https://supercollider.github.io/ https://supercollider.github.io/.
ciroduran 5y ago
That's what https://musicforprogramming.net/ https://musicforprogramming.net/ is for
franek 5y ago
The title is indeed ambiguous. It could just as well refer to sound-coding systems/languages like Sonic Pi, or to what you imagined. (Which would be an oddly specific kind of music, but cool! The operation of a compiler turned into music, somehow?) That said, I am not disappointed. But then I am also the one who posted this link in the first place. I started using Lilypond last year for transcribing the melody voices from complex sheet music and automatically transposing them into different keys when needed (which is immensely useful). Just recently I discovered that it can also generate MIDI output, so in addition to having a convenient tool to get beautiful sheet music in whatever key I need, I can now easily have my computer play the melodies and memorise them by listening (which for me, on my current instrument, is much easier than playing from notes directly).
severak_cz 5y ago
check out https://alda.io/ https://alda.io/ - it takes some form of music notation and plays it using general MIDI synth
52-6F-62 5y ago
Not me. It’s nice and refreshing to see software that is about improving playing music for people rather than people saying “we’ve solved music with our new algorithm” (as if the thing to solve with music we’re somehow a singular aspect of the mechanics).
leeter 5y ago
I was more disappointed they didn't seem to have a "Make MIDI" option; or if they did I missed it.
- Jackim 5y ago
  https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/creating-midi-output https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/creati...
HPsquared 5y ago
That, or music produced by a compiler to indicate its status.
- klyrs 5y ago
  If a compiler comes with musak, will that reduce the complaints about slow compilation speeds?

Shugyousha 5y ago

I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw this. I always thought that lilypond was a WYSWYG for music sheets but it turned out that it's more a LaTex for music sheets which is what I prefer for typesetting text.

pdpi 5y ago

As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet music. She used one of the point-and-click scorewriters for a while (Sibelius maybe?) and was thorough displeased with both the output quality and the editing process itself. After some poking and prodding, and getting her to overcome the "but it's writing code!" barrier, she fell in love with how productive it is and still uses it, some 15 years later. It was pretty interesting to see somebody with no exposure to the software world develop their own habits and code style.

franek 5y ago
> As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. This deep care is documented in the "Essay on automated music engraving" in the Lilypond docs: http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/essay-big-page.html http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/essay-big-page.h... Previously discussed (I guess -- different title and dead link): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262
jfk13 5y ago
My wife is also a musician and music teacher, but I have not been able to persuade her to tackle Lilypond. (I have occasionally done projects in Lilypond for her, and the results are great, but the barrier to entry is too high for her to scale.) What she has found much more approachable is MuseScore (https://musescore.org/ https://musescore.org/). I haven't done a careful comparison of the output to see which scores better [sorry!], but it's certainly adequate for her everyday needs, and with a cheap midi keyboard as input device, it was remarkably easy to get started.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago

flyinghamster 5y ago

If creating your scores in vimacs and then typing "make" isn't your cup of tea, there's Frescobaldi, essentially an IDE for Lilypond. https://frescobaldi.org/ https://frescobaldi.org/

samfriedman 5y ago

Lilypond helped me learn a lot of music theory I had missed in my learning to play piano; I use it to transcribe music now and it’s a fantastic piece of software (with fantastic docs!)

nlake906 5y ago

Interesting. Looks very similar to CSound score notation, with CSound being oriented towards rendering audio files, rather than printable documents. CSound is also FOSS, and has a sound generation side that is incredibly deep and detailed. https://csound.com/ https://csound.com/

roddux 5y ago

LaTeX for music? nice!

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
I came to LaTeX the other way around: Lilypond for text? Sign me up!

beepbooptheory 5y ago

Lilypond also has a guile API, and if you are not interested in the actual notation generation or at least how it looks, it can make some pretty weird and cool midi files. You can turn it into a kind of makeshift lisp Supercollider pattern generator.

agentwiggles 5y ago
That is really cool, I had a ton of fun playing with Overtone a few years ago (Clojure Supercollider wrapper). There's also Impromptu, which I think is Scheme... There's an incredibly cool talk by Andrew Sorensen using it: https://youtu.be/yY1FSsUV-8c https://youtu.be/yY1FSsUV-8c
sramsay 5y ago
Can you say a bit more about this? I know I can go look at the API, but I had no idea that it was capable of generating (?) MIDI files (I don't have cause to use Lilypond, really). Do you personally use it for generative music? Or something adjacent to that?

username223 5y ago

I'm happy to be reminded that Lilypond is still around. I used it to produce scores (and MIDIs) 15+ years ago, because it offered the same experience as LaTeX -- beautiful results if you're willing to code and, occasionally, battle eldritch horrors beneath its surface. Like (La)TeX and Emacs, I hope it becomes one of those rare pieces of software that lasts longer than a human lifetime. Few things we build these days, not just software, endure so long.

recursive 5y ago

More like compiling music notation, even though this is the original title.

klyrs 5y ago
In addition to the music engraver, you can also use lilypond to generate midi scores.

dang 5y ago

Related: Lyp – The Lilypond Swiss Army Knife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 - Dec 2016 (7 comments) LilyBin, an Online Musical Score Editor (using LilyPond) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414004 - April 2015 (1 comment) Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 - July 2010 (36 comments) Open source typesetter for sheet music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192289 - March 2010 (23 comments) LilyPond architecture (music notation software in Lisp) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379234 - Nov 2008 (2 comments)

aidenn0 5y ago

I love lilypond. My son plays the piano now and I make simplified arrangements of songs for him. He can pick out songs by ear and I'm teaching him to hand annotate first, because I don't know a better way to encourage familiarity with the notation, but I'll get him set up with lilypond eventually. There are various nicer IDEs for it, but I just run side-by-side windows with zathura and emacs; zathura will automatically reload when PDFs change on disk so I can see my changes immediately.

tunesmith 5y ago

Lilypond is freaking awesome. As a hobbyist with a music degree but unrelated career, I switched a while back, and it's saved me multiple times over just because of backwards compatibility and free software. My old version of Sibelius doesn't run on newer hardware, so some old scores I never ported are lost if I don't spend money just to export. But my old lilypond scores will always be fine.

softwarebeware 5y ago

Good thing "compiling" is in quotes. I don't think it actually meets the definition. It's more like "encoding."

Aidevah 5y ago

I've been using Lilypond for a number of years now and it's a truly remarkable piece of software. The quality of the engraving is extremely high, the amount of customization you can carry out is unrivalled, and it is also incredibly versatile. Out of the box it supports stuff ranging from Guitar and lute tablature[1] and notation specific to percussion[2] to modern chord names[3] and Baroque figured bass [4]. Did you know you can also use it to typeset neumes for Gregorian chant[5] and mensural notation[6]? Nevertheless I should mention that Lilypond serves a different purpose and is aimed at a different audience when compared to popular scorewriters such as musescore. It is primarily an engraver and should be used to typeset existing music, composing directly into it is always going to be very awkward compared to WYSIWYG editors or even just manuscript paper. The learning curve is also quite large and you must be ready to constantly refer back to its (very well written) documentation. But like any complex tool, acquiring familiarity with it is very rewarding in the long run. [1] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-notation-for-fretted-strings http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-... [2] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-notation-for-percussion http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-... [3] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/displaying-chords http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/display... [4] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/figured-bass http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/figured... [5] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typesetting-gregorian-chant http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset... [6] http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typesetting-mensural-music http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset...

andrewzah 5y ago

I'm greatly thankful for the hard work put into lilypond and frescobaldi. I use lilypond to type up leadsheets for jazz and some other genres [0], inspired by Mark Veltzer's Openbook [1]. I've gotten pretty fast at typing up songs over time. The goal is to have a CLI or web interface to generate a pdf for concert/bb/bass clef/etc, optionally include lyrics/QR codes, and so on. Being able to transpose is quite handy, although I'm working on a system to automatically handle larger transpositions (e.g. for Eb instruments or for bass clef). The problem is if I statically pick one direction (up or down), some leadsheets will have the notes too high or low. I think I can resolve it with having all songs entered in absolute pitches and scanning for the lowest/highest note. 0: https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev 1: https://github.com/veltzer/openbook https://github.com/veltzer/openbook

lelandfe 5y ago

One of my family members is a music theory professor, here's what they had to say about this: > [Lilypond] was one of a handful of early programs turning notation into ASCII text. Older program but still useful. MusicXML has made a lot of these older systems less productive these days, though: https://www.musicxml.com/ https://www.musicxml.com/ > Developed by Michael Goode at Stanford – it's now the international standard for music encoding.