Home Original page

Time we switched to unicode? (was Explanation of this Python language feature?)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue Mar 25 02:33:24 EDT 2014 
On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> Something that Chris may relate to:
>
> You type a music score into lilypond
> Then call lilypond to convert it into standard western staff notation
>
> Why not put up the lilypond (ASCII) directly on the piano/organ when you play?
>
> This is far from rhetorical... ABC,Guido,etc (not python's!) have some
> claim to be *musically* (not just textually) readable and easier to
> master than standard staff notation
>
> Still for someone
> - used to staff notation
> - under the standard presumptions of western music:
>   -- harmony
>   -- spelling c# ≠ d♭
>   -- a note is a note ie C to D is as much a note as D to E
>
> staff notation is hard to beat

I wouldn't say it's hard to beat... I happily beat time while looking
at staff notation!

(Of course, I shouldn't beat time. He doesn't like that.)

Staff notation isn't perfect by any means (and there've been various
projects to improve on it), but it's a lot better than the "source
code" form in Lilypond. This is partly because my source code tends to
look at multiple (often four) separate lines of harmony, often plus a
separate line of chords, but when I'm playing, I want to be able to
eyeball all of it at once.

But I've used WYSIWYG notation editors plenty, and *for note entry*
they offer me nothing above Lilypond's notation. I don't yearn to be
able to scribble notes on a paper staff, scan it in, and have that
functional. I don't look back with longing at NoteWorthy Composer (for
which I do own a license, and could probably hunt down the install CD
if I tried). There's a huge difference between the two.

ChrisA
More information about the Python-list mailing list