Computerized musical notation – a trivial task?

No, it’s not at all just about adding some spots and lines on a sheet of paper. It’s a fascinating matter of marriage between usability and esthetics!

Take a look at this very well-written article – “Obsessed with putting ink on paper” - from the originators of Lilypond, probably the most well-equiped music notation program existing.

If you’re not convinced about the complexities involved, take a look in this pdf: “Algorithms and data structures for a music notation program based on Guido music notation”. Take a look at page 100 and forward, get yourself a cup of tea and start meditating…

New music notation software – Ricercar

Just found this interesting project on Sourceforge the other day: Ricercar

(I strongly guess that the name is inspired by the wonderful ricercar parts in J S Bach’s work Musikaliches Opfer – anyway it leads my thought to this astonishing piece, wich is the kind of inspiring hints that I like!)

The project is founded in may 2009 and the current releases, linux/win version 0.0.0, don’t work (!) – but the java code seems to set the ambitions high. Along of course with the project mission statement: “A free, cross-platform, multilingual, cutting-edge music notation editor”

Eager to see what will come out of this!

EDIT 2009-10-28:

Unfortunately the Ricercar project isn’t developed any more. Harmath Dénes (http://thsoft.hu/en/) is going on with a project called Elysium (http://bitbucket.org/thsoft/elysium/wiki/Home), an Eclipse-based editor for Lilypond files. A pity for me, as Lilypond isn’t really my cup of caffe latte, but good luck with this project, Harmath!