LilyPond: Music notation for everyone

I'd love to see your macros if you have them online somewhere. I've lately started spending lots of time notating music in LilyPond and am seeing the need to build tooling along the way.

I started a personal folk song collection using ABC notation. For simple tunes ABC is fantastic, but now that I'm doing more choral/four-part works, I'm reaching for the more powerful tool. Yet there seems to be a huge gap between ABC (simple things done simply and in one way) and LilyPond (do literally anything you want following any format you want, dropping into Scheme as necessary). Ease-of-use/quality-of-life tooling to fill that gap is appealing.

P.S. I'd also love to hear the story of your music publishing venture. It sounds intriguing!

looks like this task could somehow be automated ;)

"I made an arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for my girlfriend (now my wife)"

Nerd! ... and beautifully done. The route to a partner's heart can be fraught with danger and false turns.

I've just heard the .mp3 - very nice (sorry - only nice!)

Interesting. A few years ago I had a bunch of music to learn fast, and was having real trouble with reading. I had a longish commute at the time and spent a big chunk of it re-transcribing the music to lilypond so I could get score and midi. The act of translating the original notes to its letter, typing it in then re-rendering and listening to the MIDI improved my sight reading massively.

The fact that slurs and grouping must be appended after the note hasn't always been so. I have been a user since its first versions, and at the beginning you would write a legato scale like this:

(c d e f g a b c)

which indeed looks more natural because resembles the way parentheses are used in mathematics and programming.

If I remember correctly, the change happened ~20 years ago because it made the notation more consistent: everything related to the note happens after the note name (durations, staccato, marcato, slurs, etc.). I remember that it took me several months to get acquainted with the new syntax.

LilyPond rules when you want to manipulate music algorithmically. Like make a music reading training app that creates examples based on your performance so far.

I only use LilyPond for engraving, and MuseScore for input. They complement each other that way as a free software replacement for the usual commercial options.

The start of that set, has, to put it blunty, moved in.

Dorico, in particular, is light years ahead, having an actually useable GUI while still being able to do advanced layout stuff, some of which would take hundreds of lines of custom macros in lilypond.

I can enter 100 bars in Dorico faster than I could 5 in lilypond… 10+ years ago when I was using it at least weekly.

You ask such good questions here. I am curious about the same. The other comments provide some clues as to the answers.

A lot of older classical scores have poor scans, low res, or are hand written. If I enjoy a piece, I'll redo the notation and upload it (generally to IMSLP).

I have a MIDI piano so I end up using the keys to input, which can be fairly quick, depending on the piece.

It's used to render sheets and audio in Wikipedia articles (I hope this answers several of your questions). Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#Lyrics_and_melod...

I have published one complete work in Lilypond which I estimate has been downloaded about 50k times (and those downloads were probably reused for multiple people, because it was an instructional work). I guess that qualifies me to answer?

* I have a background in LaTeX, so that's why I picked it up. The work I transcribed is a set of six French baroque sonatas for two violins which are commonly used in intermediate-to-advanced teaching.

* At the time I did it, there was no freely available score that showed both parts on the same page, just reproductions of the original handwritten manuscript, so I did it to have a cleaner copy where you can see both parts at the same time. I had to edit slightly because it turned out the original contained a handful of errors.'

* Very similar. Lilypond started life as LaTeX macros, and while it's now well beyond that, you can see the roots. Lilypond can output MIDIs from source.

* I don't know about git repos, but there's no reason you couldn't. I did publish the source alongside the finished PDF on IMSLP (the International Music Score Library Project, a wiki of public domain music).

* For my purposes (playing European music using the 12 tones in the traditional style from Renaissance to modern, both classical and folk), perfectly expressive. I'm not sure what you mean by abstraction in this context, but if you want to do something for which there isn't common notation, you can just write words.

I would use Lilypond without hesitation if I had a new work I wanted to publish, just as I would use LaTeX to publish a book or document. It's a typesetting system, and if you're using it, you're already committed to the form of traditional European sheet music.

I started setting up a piano blog once, which used lilypond to generate an image of the sheet music (then trimmed with image magic) and a midi file (rendered to wav with fluid synth and compressed to mp3). This would have been for small snippets (2-3 bars) of rock/pop/etc music, with some brief commentary. I guess I got distracted along the way. The output looked and sounded good though!

* What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing?

--I think people who play/practice musical instruments regularly, esp. in an ensemble, esp. in classical music (where the written notes are referred to a lot); to make arrangements, transcriptions, instrument parts, etc. out of the originals to perform for fun. I'dn't be surprised if programmer folks are overrepresented in this group. (I am one of them).

* How similar is sheet music to source code? Does any software interpret it to output audio?

--I'd like to say quite similar, but upon further thought, maybe not. e.g. In sheet music, there's no ready equivalent to functions taking arguments and returning values. Maybe the similarity is with compiled/machine code (which I am not familiar with).

* How expressive is sheet music? How constrained do you feel trying to convey your idea onto this format? Does it support abstraction, or making your own abstractions?

--It is quite expressive. Most musical material that people come up with in their minds will likely be adequately represented in sheet music. I haven't seen "user-defined" sheet music notation, which I think is what you may mean by abstractions. I suppose it could be done (and supported by LilyPond).

It has been used for large professional publications such as the 2013 Dutch protestant hymnal (>1000 songs, versions with and without accompaniment).

I use it to typeset songs that my son wants to learn on the guitar. I can tailor the difficulty and add some "special" things based on what he's learning, for example customizing chords or changing the key signature.

I also used it to typeset a simple song that I arranged and played at a funeral service. I could have written it by hand, but given I was a bit anxious about the performance it helped to have an extremely readable version.

Writing lilypond source code is about the same difficulty as LaTeX. The midi output helps stomping out mistakes and it's easy to follow the source as it plays. Sheet music is pretty expressive, it's a good balance between showing what to play and how, and lilypond is about 1:1 with sheet music.

That said in lilypond you can add some kind of abstraction through both macros and typesetter settings. For example it can calculate automatically which frets and strings correspond to notes, and generate guitar tablature (fret+string notation) and sheet music from the same source. Also, instead of specifying by hand how to play each note, you can basically tell lilypond "I want the left hand to be roughly here on the fretboard" and that affects the strings it tells the player to pluck.

* I don't know "what type of person uses this" in general, but I use it whenever I need to typeset music, which happens when I need to sing something with others. This includes be re-creating sheet music I have for better readability. I've never done any composing.

* It's not very similar to the source code. Basically you put in note names (c d e f ...) and durations (c4 e8 g8 c2). The rest is commands and markup to deal with the remaining very complex needs music typesetting has. Think Latex for music.

* I've never seen any git repos for that, but there are sites like CPDL and IMSLP that sometimes also include Lilypond source (or other sources).

* "How expressive is sheet music": I guess the easiest way to find out is to actually play an instrument or sing? It's a bit like asking "how expressive is the written word, like books and these things".

I have a set of standard macros. I rarely write more.

Oh, I didn't know there are VSCode plug-ins for Lilypond.

Which one are you using?

Western notation is a complex written language developed over centuries. It's easy to render the symbols in isolation, but not the meaning they convey to the musician who's expected to perform it. Even something like whether to render a flat or a sharp depends on context and intended use.

https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/essay.pdf is a really good explanation - simplistic "make music notes like characters in a font" gets you the information, but it is NOT at all beautiful and actively fights against you, the same way badly typeset and kerned text is hard to read.

The answer to that question has consumed books and university courses, but the LP essay linked in the sibling comment is a fine start.

Positions, orientation and spaced aren't fixed and can vary a lot. To get a bit of the detail involved on it you can check the videos for Musescore 3.6 engraving updates [0] or the "Overhaul" and "Notation" sections for the 4.0 update [1].

Those aren't long, around 5 minutes each.

  0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLR40BGNy68
  1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc08RhOQDR4

There are numerous symbols to represent pitch on a staff, numerous other symbols that can be attached to the pitch symbols that represent changes in duration, dynamics, various techniques and more. These symbols can be stacked above and below the pitch symbols, to the sides of the symbols and more. There are other symbols that can span multiple pitch symbols, groups of symbols and more. There are more symbols that control the tempo of the playback of the score, the number of times sections of the score should be repeated and other symbols that will move the current playback location of the score to some other place. The placement of all of these symbols have "rules" but these rules are really suggestions and composers will always want to adjust and bend these rules. If a system implements strict rules, that system will come under criticism as being inflexible. There seems to always an exception to every rule of music notation.

I have been working on music notation software for almost forty years and have seen programmers come and go with their attempts to "solve" the problem of music notation. It is a very difficult problem. Once upon a time SCORE [1] was considered the best of the best on music engraving software. I worked with Leland Smith to update the program to more platforms. Sadly, the SCORE source code is not available and the rights of the source code are unclear after Leland's passing. Many music publishing companies continued to maintain systems using SCORE for quite a while.

The notation engine of my iOS music notation program Komp [2] is available here: https://github.com/SemitoneGene/notation. This code is most certainly not the best or most complete, but it is easy to read and comprehend if you want to see the complexity involved. MuseScore has also been mentioned in other posts.

If I were to do a commercial engraving of a music score, I would use Dorico. It is being developed by who I would consider the most insightful and understanding group of developers who have a real desire to make the best music engraving program.

LilyPond produces very good output but offers its own series of challenges to use. MuseScore is a nice program, but it has a long way to go to meet the demands of the high professional composition and engraving market.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(software)

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/komp-create/id1103355632

[3] https://www.steinberg.net/dorico/

The problem is closely related to computational typesetting, e.g. TeX, which is an extremely complicated piece of software. While it might be true that music notation is ultimately "simpler" than document typesetting, I wouldn't stake money on that claim.

A somewhat ignorant TL;DR:

- It's probably not too difficult to render simple music in a bland, ugly way, in the same way that it's not too difficult to render ASCII text documents with a monospace font.

- When notation gets complicated it is tedious but somewhat routine to render music in a way that looks like total garbage: things are awkwardly smooshed together or spaced way too far apart; some symbols look "too small" alongside others when using uniform scaling; long lines that have to travel over multiple notes end up clashing and making the score unreadable; etc etc etc.

- Actually getting things right in a general-purpose musical notation program is hard hard work. I don't have any direct experience here but I am sure it's a nightmare and takes constant testing to figure all this stuff out.

I play jazz and don't fully believe in Western music notation :) So I can't speak too directly here on the intricacy. But I would highly recommend reading Knuth's TeX Book (and skimming the WEB source of TeX itself) just to get a sense of how many different decisions a typesetting / music notation program has to make.

In addition to the elegance, there's also a functional side, which is that people are going to be reading your stuff, at speed. I'm a jazz player, but still play a lot from sheet music, and good layout can make arrangements a lot more readable.

I'm a professional engraver. How much time you got? lol There's about 200-300 "standard" symbols for music notation, but that can balloon to upwards of 2,000 when factoring in all the nooks and crannies of the artform. Then you have to know what they all mean in order to convey the musical meaning the composer intends. Then you have to understand the psychology of players and what they would expect on a sheet of music and account for that. The "fixed positions" are very mailable depending on context, especially once we start factoring in accidentals and multiple voices on a single staff which can change the horizontal spacing in all sorts of dramatic ways. Then we have to deal with layout of the score so its density looks even and flows well, and has good page turns. Oh, and transposing instruments, cuz we still do that. And I haven't even mentioned lyrics for singers yet, which add tons and tons of new problems to solve.

It's a grueling art form, frankly, but I love it and I wouldn't do anything else.

Context: I'm Senior Product Designer for Sibelius and founder of Music Engraving Tips on Facebook/YouTube.

Nothing else comes remotely close to the engraving and scripting features.

Text entry. I find Musescore terrible (even revisited it after their huge upgrade). Being able to freely enter text means I don't have to care about timing and just get the notes on the page, which most other notation apps are strict about.

Much more robust engraving support, and, frankly, being actually open source as opposed to owned by a big conglomerate who's gobbling up music companies right and left.

Then you might like 'faust' or 'pure data'.

The biggest problem is so much of music notation's meaning is defined by it's graphical information, not just the content. This is where it differs significantly from code or even text typesetting. At some point, you have to get into the nitty gritty of where to place symbols on the page. Lillypond gets you part of the way, but the last part is really hard to do and most users are more comfortable with a WYSIWYG setup.

It's a pretty big leap to get from "notation isn't required for all forms of music" (what the person you're citing actually said) to "Lilypond is only for you if you're a classical musician". The music world isn't divided into a dichotomy of jazz players and classical players, and even many modern jazz players read and write musical notation.

Yes they do