Dear developers, most of you will know or at least have noticed that I have thought about integrating LilyPond and the XML based MEI format. If not you might consider reading my current post on http://lilypondblog.org for an introduction. Today I would like to make kind of an announcement and call for discussion.
Chances are pretty good that there will be a publicly funded development project with the goal of integrating LilyPond and MEI or - in a somewhat grander context - integrating professional music engraving in current digital music edition concepts. The project is intended to be hosted at the institute for music informatics at the music university in Karlsruhe/Germany and the ZenMEM (http://zenmen.de), a Digital Humanities institute founded for coordinating German research on digital music edition. The ZenMEM will also submit the application to the DFG (German Research Union). The actual scope and scale of the project application will have to be considered carefully but we start discussion with a three year project with two full positions. If we can make it plausible there might be the option to add some portions to commission individual development tasks externally. So while we still have to write an application and hope for its acceptance it is at least clear that the application *will* happen and there are reasons to consider it a promising application. I think this is a huge opportunity to bring LilyPond forward. First this will bring us a whole new range of users and use cases, maybe even to a point where a general audience will take notice of LilyPond on a different level. Second this potential new user base (the academic music edition community) can be expected to contribute back to LilyPond, in short and on the long run. And finally this project would mean significant amounts of money (= development capacity) thrown at us, and one can assume a significant share of that going into LilyPond development itself, and a significant share of *that* part benefitting LilyPond users in general, without considering the MEI/Digital Edition part. The task at hand is to produce the application which starts with outlining the development tasks, starting with ideas and wishes but pinning them down as concretely as possible. We intend to submit the application by the end of the year and have a meeting where people from the MEI and the LilyPond developer communities get together and outline possible tasks, with special consideration of the obstacles to overcome because of some conceptual incompatibilities. The actual discussion should take place on another, dedicated list, and I'll post to that about the outline as it currently stands. But I want to invite anyone from here to participate in that discussion as it's presumably an important and hopefully fruitful one for LilyPond. If you're interested in it please get in touch with me (if you aren't already). Best Urs _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
