Are Lilyponds beams thick enough?

[Valentin Petzel]

Hello,

Lilypond’s has rather light beams, i.e. the thickness of a beam and the space 
between beams is pretty much the same.
In some cases such as longer distance to the sheet or bad lighting this makes 
the score more readable, but in other cases, such as a medium reading distance 
in good lighting, this makes reading the score very hard, because the 
whitespace between the Beam lines is perceived by the brain as potentially 
relevant information. Making the beam heavier will decrease the whitespace, 
leading to the brain perceiving the whole beam as one piece of information, 
thus leading to less distraction from the notes. This is especially true for 
backlighted forms such as a display.

I’ve appended the beginning of Bach BWV 1001, the bottom staff has the standard 
beam thickness of 0.48ss, while the top staff has a drastically larger beam 
thickness of 0.55ss.

You might notice, that in bad light or in bigger distances, the lower staff is 
clearer to read, while at normal distance or on screens, the top staff feels 
much less comfortable to read.

So what’s your opinion about that?
→ Is Lilypond’s default value for beam thickness good, or should it be 
slightly larger? (0.55 surely is not a good default value, that is too heavy)
→ Since the best beam thickness depends heavily on the use, alongside with 
other aspects, should there be some call to load sensible defaults for a 
certain target?

I would love to hear your opinions about that.
Regards,
Valentin

bach1001.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document