gregorian chant improvement

[Elie Roux]

Hello,

I'm working on gregorian chant reprensentation for a project student in
a graduate ingeneering school in France, and I have had a lot of
discussion with a monk on it. My aim is to improve gregorian chant
representation in free softwares for monk to use it.

I read the latest version of the documentation and I saw a lot of
changes since the previous one, this makes me hope that people are
working on gregorian chant and it is I think a very good thing, because
there is still a lot to do.

The first thing I would like to say is that taking the table of neumes
of Solesmes is good... for Solesmes books, but there are a lot of neumes
used in a lot of books that do not appear in this table. I do not think
it is a good idea to list them : I have a swiss book where 188 different
neumes are listed (without figurae). So it seems very hard to count all
neumes.

But in my work with the monk we discovered that the most simple was to
decompose neumes in simpler elements. We are able to list all the simple
elements, and so we can make all possible neumes. It would be much
simpler I think, than listing all possible neumes. It would also permit
to put quilismas everywhere, not only in pes (they can be at any place
in most of neumes).  If you want more details about these simple
elements tell me, I will translate a document I made about a XML schema
for gregorian chant (in french on http://omega.enstb.org/eroux/doc_fr.pdf).

A lot of details on it are in a document I made :
http://omega.enstb.org/eroux/notation_en.pdf . I do not think this
notation can be used in Lilypond (in fact no one responded to me so I do
not really know...), but the philosophy is interesting I think.

There are also things that are missing :
 
In some score there are a lot of larger spaces (due to the translation
from very ancient notation). (example in my document)

In every gregorian chant score (I do not know any exception) there is a
dropped initial, and small informations above the dropped initial.

The alignment of lyrics under notes is... very bad in currend version.
In fact the first note that corresponds to a syllable is above the fist
vowel of this syllable (every neume corresponds to a syllable), except
if it is a diphtong (the alignment is between the two vowels). This
point is fundamental, it is for that reason that when I showed a
Lilypond example to the monk I know he said it was "horrible".

Thank you by advance for an answer,
-- 
Elie