Re: Expressive Notation Package (ENP)

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 07:11:22PM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
> Bernardo Barros wrote:
> > I wonder why not just work with Lilypond, or even modify Lilypond if
> > necessary to atend contemporary notation. It's easier to humans to
> > understad and it's already working ok :-) Maybe it has to do with the
> > render time????
> 
> The 'Sibelius Academy' mention is probably the clue there.  I think the
> people involved were interested in developing a proprietary commercial
> project, which is kind of difficult with a Lilypond derivative.

That's a rather large fail.  "Sibelius Academy" is a university.
http://www.siba.fi/en/

You might recall that Sibelius was a composer?  A rather famous
composer from Finland?  In fact, some people might say "the *only*
famous composer from Finland?  (no offense intended to Fins)
Scarce wonder that they named a university after him!


> I think that one can probably do with Lilypond anything that this
> package does, it's just that some of it will require more custom scheme
> code than other stuff.  I know that there have been some pretty
> spectacular things done by some clever members of this list (see the
> discussion some weeks back comparing Lilypond with SCORE).

The ENP format is based on lisp.  It's much easier for a computer
to parse and create those files than "normal" lilypond files
(somebody could work in lilypond entirely in scheme, but
formatting a score that way would be quite odd).  There's a
graphical front-end for ENP... if you wanted to write music in it
manually, you'd use a mouse.  But the main purpose of ENP is for
constraint programming.

Since the focus is computer-generated music, the notation quality
isn't as good as lilypond's.  But nobody is pitching ENP as a
replacement for high-quality sheet music.  It's a program for
music notation, created from a real university, by real
researchers, made available for free.  They seem to have used a
non-free version of lisp to create binaries, but it's not clear if
you require those or whether you can just run the lisp directly.


I appreciate your enthusiasm for lilypond, but ENP does not
deserve your scorn.

- Graham