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Ooo yay, something I can actually talk about on here as a professional music engraver. These music typewriters are certainly interesting curiosities but never

Ooo yay, something I can actually talk about on here as a professional music engraver. These music typewriters are certainly interesting curiosities but never really caught on like the advertisements and curious articles would make you think. Music notation is has far more graphical needs than words as the horizontal and vertical spacing of objects have meaning beyond the objects themselves. So spacing on a typewriter like this can be extremely difficult to do well. This is why metal plate engraving was the dominant form of music engraving for a final published product right up until the 1980s when computers took over. It was far more reliable and you could get any level of complexity of notation. It did the same thing as the typewriter, but the human was the typewriter rather than a mechanical contraption. While the metal-side of the art is lost, the musical and graphical skill required to make the notation still lives on in "engravers" today who do the work on computers. Practically all music notation today is done on computers with the various softwares and platforms out there. Rendering good music notation is a very difficult problem to solve but most of the good engines have finally gotten to the point where any reasonable notation is possible, and even some unreasonable ones. There is little love lost for the old methods of engraving in my generation, especially given how expensive and time-consuming it was compared to today. Full disclosure, I'm on the Sibelius dev team and have used it for close to 20 years, so I definitely have a horse in the race of which platform is best. But it's clear that with more competition in this small market, each platform is pushing the others to get better and more flexible.

TylerE 4y ago
What does it say that I knew exactly who you were as soon as saw the screen name..
- Tokkemon 4y ago
  Glad to be known in the industry :P
chrismorgan 4y ago
> There is little love lost for the old methods of engraving in my generation, especially given how expensive and time-consuming it was compared to today. There may be little love lost for the old methods, but there is much love lost for many of the results.
- Tokkemon 4y ago
  Perhaps, but in the right hands, computer notation programs can make equally good engraving results. The only thing it can't really do well is the "authentic" or "organic" feel of a hand-carved plate, where natural human error is introduced. But on the best plate engraving, such an effect is so subtle to be practically impossible to notice.
Slow_Hand 4y ago
That's really interesting. I don't envy anyone who had to do music engraving prior to the usage of computers, so hats off to you and thanks for your contributions. Musical notation is such a complex, intricate, system and even with computers it's still a challenging thing to get right. I've used several different notation programs over the years and most of them make me want to scream and cuss over how un-intuitive they are compared to hand-writing a score. There is so much complexity and specificity required of the tools. No doubt you've probably heard of Tantacrul and his Youtube channel. Watching him pick apart the design issues of every major notation software really highlights just how hard it can be to get this right. His channel occupies a nice niche at the intersection of music composition, design, and programming. Also his videos are entertaining as hell. I particularly enjoy his video about the making of a new notation typeface. He does a good job at making the topic of music notation come to life, and also throws in a short history of the program 'Score' for some context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng

TylerE 4y ago

What does it say that I knew exactly who you were as soon as saw the screen name..

Tokkemon 4y ago
Glad to be known in the industry :P

chrismorgan 4y ago

> There is little love lost for the old methods of engraving in my generation, especially given how expensive and time-consuming it was compared to today. There may be little love lost for the old methods, but there is much love lost for many of the results.

Tokkemon 4y ago
Perhaps, but in the right hands, computer notation programs can make equally good engraving results. The only thing it can't really do well is the "authentic" or "organic" feel of a hand-carved plate, where natural human error is introduced. But on the best plate engraving, such an effect is so subtle to be practically impossible to notice.

Slow_Hand 4y ago

That's really interesting. I don't envy anyone who had to do music engraving prior to the usage of computers, so hats off to you and thanks for your contributions. Musical notation is such a complex, intricate, system and even with computers it's still a challenging thing to get right. I've used several different notation programs over the years and most of them make me want to scream and cuss over how un-intuitive they are compared to hand-writing a score. There is so much complexity and specificity required of the tools. No doubt you've probably heard of Tantacrul and his Youtube channel. Watching him pick apart the design issues of every major notation software really highlights just how hard it can be to get this right. His channel occupies a nice niche at the intersection of music composition, design, and programming. Also his videos are entertaining as hell. I particularly enjoy his video about the making of a new notation typeface. He does a good job at making the topic of music notation come to life, and also throws in a short history of the program 'Score' for some context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng