Interesting that Music notation even seems to be a “challenge” to do with a computer, speaking as a complete layman. It seems like there is only a few note symbols to draw, at fixed positions. Can someone explain what makes good engraving good?
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.
You're really looking for patterns on the staff rather than the exact pedantic notes that are present in the notation.
Me? Still learn best by ear. Unfortunately this is also the slowest method....
There is also the problem that human memory has limitations, and if I stop playing something, I will forget it after a couple of weeks, so again musical notation is very helpful.
> You're really looking for patterns on the staff rather than the exact pedantic notes that are present in the notation.
Exactly. Playing the exact tune becomes boring after a while; music is a fun creative exercise for me, so the notes and chords are a general direction, not a precise roadmap. If I wanted a perfect interpretation, I'd listen to the recorded piece instead of play it.
Those aren't long, around 5 minutes each.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLR40BGNy68
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc08RhOQDR4A 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.
My friend - accomplished classical musician and now pretty well known jazz musician tells me you can't write down latin music accurately. Personally I think while written language is largely about conveying a fairly unambiguous meaning, written music is really about providing enough for the player / or conductor to be able to infer what they need to do.
I work in a much more notation-bound genre (I am an orchestra bassoon player) and I would say you would struggle a LOT to notate twinkle twinkle little star in a way that makes everyone perform it the same.
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)