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Introducing myself
From: |
Robert Gaebler |
Subject: |
Introducing myself |
Date: |
Wed, 12 May 2021 18:21:23 +0000 |
I am a retired avionics systems and software engineer. Most of my career has
been in the avionics industry. But my training, at both undergraduate and
graduate levels, has been in computer science, with a significant dose of
languages and systems. So, I am already familiar with LISP (Scheme) and C++
and Python, a little bit with Unix (Linux) and its shells, and with grammars
and grammar-directed parsing. In short, I am already quite a ways up the
learning curve on a lot of the underlying implementation technology. My main
deficiency is in lacking familiarity with the vast volume and complexity of the
underlying Lilypond implementation.
I am working on developing a system for engraving music for the diatonic button
accordion (the "Steirische Harmonika"). My target notation is the most popular
notation used in German speaking countries and surrounding areas. It is called
"Griffschrift." It is essentially a tablature, but the notation coopts the
traditional musical staff and notes to represent, not pitches, but, which
button in which row is to be pressed. The rhythm, note duration values, rests,
and dynamic markings are inherited exactly as in traditional musical notation,
so most of the notation is already familiar to most people learning
Griffschrift. Plus, it lends itself well to already-existing and widely
available music engraving technology, for creating Griffschrift scores. The
most conspicuous difference in appearance between a Griffschrift score and a
musical score, is that often as much as half of the notes are represented with
"x" note heads, and half the notes with traditional oval note heads.
I wish to provide a simple input notation in Lilypond for encoding the music.
I have gotten as far as I can using the surface features of the Lilypond
language, with satisfying success as far as the final appearance goes. I have
engraved two of the polkas that I am currently working on learning, as
exercises to develop the notation (and relearn Lilypond after a 15 year hiatus).
However, the notation I have so far is rather awkward and quirky. I think it
might now be time to delve into Lilypond internals, to see if I can develop a
cleaner user input notation. There are a lot of kludges and hacks in my score
template, that had to be put there to work around some of the artifacts
produced by Lilypond's normal behavior, which ended up getting in the way. The
profligate intermixture of "x" note heads with traditional note heads is
handled adequately with macros, but this imposes other quirky workarounds into
the notation.
So, I am trying to set myself up as a developer in order to explore and
experiment with more sophisticated capabilities of the inner workings. I hope
experienced users can help me through the pains of setting up a working
development system, as well as using the inner facilities effectively.
For the benefit of anyone who may be curious, or anyone who might want to help
me somewhere down the line, but wants to see an example to better visualize
what we are dealing with, I have included a Lilypond source file and its
Griffschrift .pdf output.
Thank you
auf-26.ly
Description: auf-26.ly
auf-26.pdf
Description: auf-26.pdf
- Introducing myself,
Robert Gaebler <=