Welcome to this fourteenth issue of the LilyPond Report!
OK, let’s admit it: this installment has been released with some delay. Like, nine to ten months… How is that? What has happened since then in the LilyPond community? Read on to find out. This week, we’ll also introduce our new community website, and an amazing free-hardware project by Andrew Wagner. Finally, don’t miss our brand new section, contributed by a very special guest! As always, you can post your comments at the bottom of the page, or even register and contribute to the LilyPond Report’s next issues.
This Week’s Desultory Editorial
Greetings,
What a year, what a year.
Firstly, I’d like to apologize to all LilyReport readers
and contributors that I have let down for the past months.
For those who would have missed my self-advertising, I’ve been working on a large (LilyPond-related) project for the past four years, and the last few months were particularly exhausting. Since I was (very much) uncertain whether I could possibly finish it someday — and since publishing this weekly Report clearly implies some kind of a commitment —, putting this column on hold was the only sane thing to do.
This is not a choice I made happily — well, actually this is not a choice I made at all. As I was getting ready to release the 14th Report issue, this release got delayed by a few days because of my work. Then, days became weeks, weeks became months, and… Well, you get the idea. Therefore, let me apologize to people I had interviewed who never saw their contribution published; with some luck, we’ll be able to update this material and release it in weeks to come.
What’s up with LilyPond? (part 1)
As you may have noticed, the Report is now hosted on a brand new dedicated website, as well as our wiki, the Frogs’ mini-website and many more exciting stuff to come! Please feel free to consider this platform as your own… Now that your editor’s name is no longer part of the website’s URL 
What’s with this "Frogs" things by the way? It’s a new team that has been created by Graham Percival, and is handled by Carl Sorensen. After his Grand Documentation Project, Graham started the Grand Organization Project (don’t laugh). He told us his plan:
"Frogs" will be a team of bug-fixers (because frogs eat bugs, and you often find them in Ponds of Lilies). We’ve gotten relatively good about new bug reports — maybe 1/3 of new reports result in a patch within a week or two. However, there’s still a backlog of over 200 bugs.
The idea behind Frogs is simple: each person will fix an average of one bug per month. You can either fix an existing bug, or report a new bug and fix it. We won’t quibble over the severity of the bug; if a new Frog (Tadpole?
is only comfortable fixing "program errors" or similar false warning messages, those will still count towards his "1 bug per month" average. If you feel skilled and ambitious, go ahead and fix the dreaded #34.
So, here we are, a new team is being trained, and it’s definitely a good sign in a community where, inspite our numerous and enthusiastic users, we do lack skilled developers. While the initial Frogs team counted eight Frogs, they are now a dozen — assuming, and we certainly do hope so, that none of them will quit soon. A new documentation resource has also been created: the Contributor’s Guide. So, if you love LilyPond, if you want to help, if you want to learn new things, no matter your computer skills (or lack thereof), the word is:
Join the Frogs!
In memoriam Rune Zedeler
On a much darker tone now, the LilyPond Report has to mention this mail that Joe Neeman sent in August, announcing that our long-time contributor and friend Rune Zedeler was deceased.
Rune was an important contributor to the LilyPond project, and an important person to many of us, including myself, since I was lucky enough to meet with him in Paris in late 2007.
Our community paid homage to Rune in the only way we could, by naming our new stable LilyPond release after him.
We are proud to announce the release of GNU LilyPond 2.12 “Rune”.
Our joy is tinged with sadness, as long-time LilyPond contributor and friend Rune Zedeler passed away on the 2nd of July, 2008. This release is dedicated to him.
Rune was a computer programmer, a musician and a valued contributor to LilyPond. He had been enthusiastically involved in the project for the past six years, and he will be sorely missed in our community.
I was asked to write the announcement notice, but what can one say in such a situation? Therefore we kept it very short. Maybe some time in the future, we’ll be able to talk more about him here.
What’s up with LilyPond? (part 2)
In a community where new things happen every day, keeping up on a weekly basis is hard enough already, let alone summing up months of new stuff!
Here’s an example.
As you may remember, a while back we tried to present some of the features this new version had to offer… Well, this list is really out-of date compared to the actual release, that happened just a few months afterwards!
Some of these new features include:
- Customizable note flags through Scheme-settable properties
- Nested contexts
- New, more customizable accidental styles (these last two features were contributed by Rune)
- Easier and more flexible Frets diagrams
- Harp pedal diagrams
- showFirstLength property, completing the existing showLastLength
- extensible metronome marks, with support for tempo markup indications
LilyPond’s Companion projects
As you may remember, one of the goals of this Report is to keep in touch with various LilyPonder’s projects, that may be related to LilyPond, to Free software or Free culture… or that are just plain exciting stuff
The Do-It-Yourself Keyboard Project was briefly announced by Andrew Wagner one year ago but has gone unnoticed since then. Since at that time the Report talked about open hardware, it was a good time to have a closer look at this. Who’s Andrew? What’s this project about?
Here is the paper Andrew sent me to answer my interrogations.
The Beautiful Synergy Between Lilypond, Alternative Music Notation, and The DIY Keyboard Project
By Drew Wagner
First, a little about my background: My father is very well known in the cello restoration business, so from an early age I had the impression that instruments are not just to be played, but can also be built yourself. I have been playing a mix of classical piano and jazz trumpet since I was a kid. I’m currently pursuing my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I have studied both mechanical and electrical engineering.
My interest in the Janko keyboard layout, alternative music notation, and LilyPond all stem from my desire to learn jazz improvisation on the piano. For better or worse, I’m the sort of person who can’t stand to do anything that is unnecessarily tedious, even if I end up spending a lot more time developing a more elegant solution. In this case the tedious task is having to learn the same chord progressions in twelve different keys with twelve different fingerings. The elegant solution (even if it takes us a decade to develop) is the Janko keyboard.
There have been parallel developments in both keyboard design and musical notation: in both cases there has been a push for simpler symmetric designs and recent technological advances that reduce the lock-in to traditional solutions. On a Janko keyboard the keys are arranged so that transposition does not dramatically change the feel of the music on the keyboard, i.e. you can play in all twelve keys with the same fingering. Pitch intervals that are equivalent actually feel the same on the keyboard.
Similarly, in most modern music notations, pitch intervals that are equivalent actually look the same on the page. Transposition does not dramatically change the appearance of the music on the page.These days, interest in alternative notations is growing, in no small part due to the freedom that software like LilyPond and public music databases, like the Mutopia project, enable. With automatic transcription to different notations, the cultural lock-in to traditional notation is greatly reduced. The alternative notation LilyPond patches by Kevin Dalley and maintained by Mark Hanlon at the Music Notation Project are particularly good.
- RepRap
- A GPL-licensed 3D printer
that has the amazing
ability to replicate itself!Similarly, rapid prototyping (i.e. the RepRap project), fast cheap processors and better solid modeling software are rapidly bringing digital keyboard construction within the reach of hobbyists.
The goal of the DIY Keyboard project is to divide the labor for the hardest parts of keyboard development (i.e. designing scanning circuitry, doing PCB layout, making the initial molds for the keys, etc.), and to make all of the design documents available free online. Although I am personally most interested in the Janko layout, the DIY Keyboard project is not specific to any particular layout. While the long-term goal is a complete keyboard design, some work has also been done on a set of replacement keys for a commercial digital keyboard.
One of my wilder dreams is that an improved music notation and an improved keyboard design will evolve together and synergistically bring about a dramatic increase in the popularity of music-making and the quality of music in general. Even though instrument design and notation are only a small part of what music is all about, any time and energy that their simplification can free up can be devoted to artistic innovation.
Drew Wagner
The DIY keyboard project is released under GPLv3 license; it’s source code is publically available. Good luck guys!
The Quote of the Week
This week’s quote, as I once promised, is from Mats Bengtsson. You may remember that he was said to be a "bloody saint", well, I believe the following quote proves it in a nutshell:
Since I have only used LilyPond for 11 years, I have some remaining questions on how it works.
For those who’d want to know, the question was about the way contexts are internally named by LilyPond. It led to an interesting discussion, which was followed four months later by a longer discussion on the -devel list, initiated by Trevor Bača.
The Postcard of the week
For years, Graham Percival, Documentation Editor of the LilyPond project, has ruled over the documentation, mocking contributors, terrorizing newbies, making horrendous wordplays, propagating hideous geek-subculture idiosyncrasy and (reportedly) eating babies.
Then in summer 2007, Graham announced privately, then publicly that he was leaving the Lilypond project.
Since we’ve been kind of getting used to him ("the devil you know…"), many of us felt sad. Many of us begged him to stay. But there was nothing we could do. His mind was made up. As a last action, he had launched the Grand Documentation Project; when this project was over, after three months as planned, there was nothing left to hold him back.
Ever since, we haven’t heard from him.
Which is the only reason why I started the LilyPond Report in the first place: I wanted to let Graham know that, whenever he’d feel like it, our door would still be open, and there would always be a place for him here.
For an eternity, I didn’t get any answer.
Then a few days ago, I finally received a postcard from Graham…
I learned how to act by reading usenet.
For those of you too young to have experienced it, usenet (or "newsgroups", or "nntp") was a fantastic collection of text forums. They function much like mailists, but they’re centralized and more public. In case you’re wondering about the changing verb tenses, that’s no accident — usenet was a fantastic collection (but is now merely a collection), but the underlying technology is still similar to mailists.
Nostalgia aside, usenet was fantastic for a shy undergraduate student. Here was a collection of a few hundred people with the same (rather specific) interests as me. Even better, the communication was text only!
I’m very shy in person — if I’m at a party with more than 50% new people, I clam up. Only a direct question (most often about my research) will get me talking. But once my audience has lost interest, I shut up again. (At least I’m good at noticing when they lose interest.
In addition, I occasionally stammer. It’s not too severe… even when I’m really stumbling over a word, it never takes me longer than ten seconds to say it. As long as I thoroughly rehearse any presentations (teaching, conferences, etc), it doesn’t really get in the way of my life. But it is another reason why I’m not the life of parties.
So when I discovered the joys of text-only communication, I took to it like a duck to water. I’ve always been fond of writing; by the time I entered university, I’d written about four hundred pages. Granted, they were really bad self-insertion fantasy novels about "Maharg" or "Gramaharg" and the like… but still, writing was very easy for me.
*** When I wrote earlier that I "learned how to act", I meant that in the theatrical meaning. Sure, "how to act" can mean "proper behavior in civilized society" (and now many of you are rolling your eyes and saying "gee, so that’s why he’s so abrupt on the -user mailist"
As I became heavily involved in LilyPond, I noticed that the mailists were very… "professional". Now, there’s nothing wrong with being professional and businesslike. No, wait; there is something wrong with that. It’s not as much fun. IMNSHO, "having fun" is an extremely non-trivial issue in a volunteer project. If people enjoy it, they’ll continue doing it. Doesn’t matter if "it" is writing code, documentation, or simply answering interesting emails. I decided to spice things up. But how? My usenet persona was definitely un-professional, but… well… a bit too un-professional. I wanted spice, not a fire.
I’ve always admired curmudgeon characters. You know, the experienced veterans who have little patience for whippersnappers. I love reading their sarcastic comments as they fix the problems the youngsters get themselves into. And they ooze self-assurance… what could be a better role for a shy computer geek to play?
The rest, as they say, is history. I get some nasty responses to my sarcasm, but I also get emails from people saying how much they enjoy reading my emails. If somebody seems offended by my curmudgeonish comments, I tone down my comments in future emails to them. And if somebody seems to enjoy my comments, I make them more severe.
But most of all, my curmudgeon acting keeps me amused. If I couldn’t act this way — in both the "behavior" and "theatrical" meanings of the word — then I think I’d have lost interest and wandered off years ago.
[N.B. This issue was actually supposed to be released on April the 1st.]
And this concludes the fourteenth issue of The LilyPond Report.
Cheers,
Valentin Villenave
