Welcome to this sixth issue of the LilyPond Report!
This week we’ll go on bashing commercial music software, discuss how to make music in the geekest way and see how LilyPond perfectly fits Mozart’s musical forms. We will also mention web stats, fake teeth, hip-hop, and the latest trendy economics theory. Finally, don’t miss the two new sections that have been added to the Report! 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,
Last week I asked you — and myself — if the LilyPond Report wasn’t too long and somehow boring. Well, my website’s statistics show that I may not be the only one to think so: the number of visitors, indeed, has kept dramatically decreasing since I launched this column. That was to be expected, of course: new things are always more attractive, and the 2-months-old Report is already a dinosaur, given the Internet’s tempo. However, seeing your audience divided by three or even four on such a short time line is never reassuring…
John Mandereau told me, several years ago, that this column should be more visible (he also told me that I should at last give my [Site] a real name 
. Is it the point? I doubt it. All I’m expecting is that most dedicated LilyPonders will keep reading the Report, and at some point contribute to it, by posting comments, sending articles, pictures, and even sound or video recordings; I keep saying that every week, but I mean it: the LilyPond Report does need you!
In the meantime, you’ll see that new sections have been added to the Report: the "Score of the week" is meant to present some scores I found on Mutopia (then again, feel free to send me some links if you happen to stumble upon anything interesting), the "Idea of the week" will keep track of some good ideas that can be posted, from time to time, on our mailing lists, and unfortunately get buried or are left unnoticed.
Happy reading!
News from the Free World
Okay, this week for a change, let’s talk about something I don’t know anything about and I’m not interested in. I’m not referring to the upcoming Ubuntu release (hmm… that said…) — I mean… economics.
For several weeks, I’ve been following some discussions about Chris Anderson and his new book, entitled Free, and expected to be published in 2009. I wanted to mention it in the Report, but there was always other subjects I was more familiar with and more eager to talk about.
- Chris Anderson
In the Free World, we are very touchy about the distinction between free as in "free beer" and free as in "free speech" [1]. There would be many things to say about the relationship between these two concepts, and saying many things is precisely what does Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired. His first book made him famous thanks to his strong "Long Tail Theory"; everyone has been waiting for his next one, which undoubtly be at least as much brilliant and controversial.Well, a few weeks ago some excerpts were published in Wired; that gives us an opportunity to have a look and a first impression.
The title says it all: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. From the example of King Gillette’s disposable-blades model to Zeno’s paradox that tends to make "almost nothing" look like "nothing", Anderson seems to base his demonstration on a dialectical approach, and at some points he even reminds me of early sociologists such as Max Weber, even if he actually prefers to refer to Milton Friedman, in a critical way. His style is direct and strong, filled with short sentences and mottos. Another interesting point is his "taxonomy of Free", distinguishing such concepts as Freemium, Gift economy etc.
Though this book has not been published yet, you may already have read about it on the Web, where it has been discussed, commented, criticized [2]]: in France, I’ve read quite a few reviews about it. As often, right-wing reviewers criticize him for being a crypto-communist while left-wings reviewers take his arguments for an apology of wild neolibertarianism. Among the most sensible reviews, you can read, for instance, these two articles by Alex Iskold: The Danger of Free and Beware of Freeconomics.
As for me, I’m not really into this hype, no matter how brilliant it looks; I admit (and hope) that Free Software movement is part of a bigger picture that is likely to change the world, but I precisely wonder if Chris Anderson is really interested in dealing with this "big" picture. Not only doesn’t he mention the Free World’s specificities, but he also misses an international and political point of view: the Third World is left unmentioned, and so are any potential political concerns. I don’t really care to know whether Google is going to make more money in 2012 or not; I do feel concerned about knowing whether it will be good or bad for democracy, whether it will be harmful or not for poor countries, for citizens all over the world, for their civil rights, privacy and freedoms.
What’s up with LilyPond?
"Hahahahahah…"
(this is me looking at Sibelius’ and Finale’s websites.)
Last week I intended to demonstrate LilyPond’s page-breaking algorithm, and as I was looking for a way to introduce it, I decided to compare this feature with what commercial music softwares have to offer. Paying them a visit turned to be quite enjoyable, but necessarily in a good way for them.
"Hahahahaha…"
Now this is me reading Sibelius’ FAQ:
Are you going to release Sibelius for Linux or other operating systems?
We have no current plans to release Sibelius on any other operating systems.
Besides, both Sibelius or Finale only accept 32 bits architectures… Hmm, let’s make a table, just for fun:
| Sibelius | Finale | LilyPond |
|---|---|---|
| Mac>10.4 | Mac>10.4 | Mac>10.3 |
| Win32 | Win32 | Win32 |
| Linux32 | ||
| Linux64 | ||
| LinuxPPC | ||
| BSD32 | ||
| BSD64 | ||
| ARM (?) |
OK, that was easy.
"Hahahahahah…"
Now this is me reading Sibelius’ and Finale’s system requirements: 512MB RAM required, 1GB recommended; 400MB hard drive space required, 2GB (Finale), 3.5GB (Sibelius) recommended.
Last week we were talking with Francisco Vila, who told us his students were using 128MB RAM computers. Hmmm… No comment.
No comment about the prices, either: see by yourself.
Now, you could say that such comparisons are a bit mean. I agree, none can prove his value just by emphasizing his competitors’ mediocrity. However, please note that this argument is precisely the best that these companies can use: on Sibelius website, there’s half a dozen pages… only meant to show Sibelius’ superiority over Finale. The less ridiculous of these pages is probably not this 1500-words article from a "random user" entitled I Made The Switch. Well, lucky for you. As for us, we are not making any switch: LilyPond, forever.
Actually, as I’m just about to publish this issue, a new user Richard Wattenbarger has just sent a mail on our mailing list:
I’m relatively new to Lilypond, and I love it! It makes so many things easier than in, say, Sibelius (which I have been using).
Mmm… who was talking of "making the switch?"
On the next Report’s issue, we’ll come back to the way commercial music softwares are advertised on their web sites.
The LilyPond Feature of the Week
We have it. Any questions?
I was saying you can’t prove your value by just showing how mediocre the other guys are.
Hmm.. Let’s take another look (I really can’t help it) at Sibelius’ website.
In other programs, to get instrumental parts you have to ‘extract’ them from the full score. You then have to spend time checking them and cleaning them up. And if you make revisions to the score later - which almost always happens in practice - you either have to spend ages making the same revisions in the parts yourself, or extract them all over again.
Not so in Sibelius.Sibelius has a unique feature called Dynamic Parts. You don’t have to extract them – in fact, you don’t have to do anything to get parts!
Hmm.
"Unique feature" — really?
Let’s go home now. On LilyPond’s website, you can see a draft for what would have been a Sibelius-like ad:
Unfortunately, it is hard to explain some of the more advanced features in just a few words. For example, LilyPond does not have part extraction, but rather a much more powerful mechanism: part-combining and automatic cue notes.
What?? How could it be possible? A more powerful thing than Sibelius®? No way…
That is true.
When typesetting a score, you can store your music into so-called variables. A variable is defined in the simplest way you can imagine:
musicVariable = { a'4 g'8 a' f'4 g' }
Afterwards, this variable can be used in your score, in every way you can imagine:
- solo instrument:
\new Staff {
\musicVariable
}
- ensemble:
<<
\new Staff { \musicVariable }
\new Staff { \anotherMusicVariable }
>>
- two parts on the same Staff:
\new Staff {
\partcombine
\musicVariable
\anotherMusicVariable
}
- quoting one part in another part:
\addQuote music \musicVariable
<<
\new Staff { \musicVariable }
\new Staff { \anotherMusicVariable \cueDuring #"music" #up {s1} }
>>
I could go on… Of course, these features can sometimes have some bugs; the main difference is, of course, that, generally speaking, bugs are more likely to be addressed in an open-source project than in a commercial software; as Francisco told us last week, "you cannot simply keep on pirating Finale every year just to see if they have fixed something".
Dynamic parts? We have it. Any questions?
The Score of the week
I was telling you about the use of variables in LilyPond; well, here is an excellent example to show you their power.
With variables, you can print your music the way you want, as we’ve seen, but also repeat it, transpose it and much more! About a year ago, a LilyPonder named Alejandro Aguilar Sierra sent his first score to the Mutopia project: it was Mozart’s famous Sonata facile K.545 (you can hear a recording here) — which I wouldn’t regard as facile at all, by the way.
Please have a look at Alejandro’s source code, particularly the \score block:
You can distinctly see the structure of the music: a binary form, with modulations to the dominant and back to the tonic. In this sonata, Mozart uses verbatim transpositions, so it was exactly twice less work for Alejandro (and a great way to demonstrate Mozart’s structural thinking). Good work!
The Idea of the week
The brilliant idea I’d like to present this week is from Graham Percival (who incidentally also offered to kiss me this week, but that’s not his most brilliant idea . In a short mail to the development list, about a month ago, he proposed:
Here’s an interesting idea that my brother mentioned while I was complaining about a related problem in the docs:
- if system-count is 1, enable ragged-right by default.
(If system-count is > 1, leave it disabled)[…] This would simplify the docs (particularly LSR stuff), bug reports, and the like.
This idea was widely approved on the mailing list; however nobody has had the time to implement it yet; let’s hope someone will soon — Bravo Graham, and congrats to your brother!
LilyPond’s Companion Projects
This week on LilyPondTool’s mailing list, Joshua Koo shared with us a small application: a Virtual 3D Piano Flash Application.
Just like to share an application I and some friends recently made.
[…]Under "studio", you can use the piano to record and search. The search engine has been provided by musipedia. I also used Lilytool and lilypond to generate MIDI sound samples.
Granted, one has to bear with Flash and Facebook to access it; nevertheless, it’s a good start.
On a completely different level, Bernardo Barros introduced us to "LilyLib", a "a set of classes that try to translate data from SuperCollider to the Lilypond format".
I didn’t know SuperCollider at all, but it seems to be quite an interesting project with a very active community. According to its Wikipedia page,
SuperCollider is an environment and programming language […] for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition.
[…] It is an efficient and expressive dynamic programming language which makes it an interesting framework for acoustic research, algorithmic music and interactive programming.
Not having a clue of what it precisely is or does doesn’t prevent me from being impressed. Having looked for some demonstrations, I found a couple of funny videos on Youtube:
- A funny concert with a bunch of geeks improvising with their laptops
If you are interested in sound processing, electroacoustics, or if you’re just curious, check it out and let us know!
The Geek of the Week
A few weeks ago (but I haven’t found the time to tell this story earlier), Richard Stallman allowed me to look super-trendy with my pupils, by showing them I knew how to crank dance. We already know RMS was fond of dancing (though a bad knee injury), but perhaps you missed this video [3]:
Nice moves — and kudos to the laptop
The Quote of the Week
A couple weeks ago we mentioned some unusual symbols that could be printed as musical indications; well this week, Risto Vääräniemi told us a funny story that I wanted to reproduce here, in case you’d have missed it:
A couple a decades ago there was a Finnish comedian / humoristic singer called Esa Pakarinen. A story tells that one composer once wrote that particular performance mark on a score to tell him to take his false teeth off. It certainly adds a new angle to the performance.
[4]
And this concludes the sixth issue of The LilyPond Report.
Cheers,
Valentin Villenave
