I'll confess that sometimes the LP community can be fractious - but I am truly thankful at how generous and simply astonishing the community can be. It's not been two hours and Mr. Blankenship not only has a "yes, you can do this with LP" but links to materials and documentation and, now, a freaking example showing that it not only is possible, but a "here you go!"
What a terrific group of people you all are. Really. In our seemingly unhelpful world, here you all are doing this for this young scholar. All of you are wonderful people. -- “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” ― Aristotle On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 1:49 PM Jean Abou Samra <j...@abou-samra.fr> wrote: > > Le 23/10/2020 à 19:21, Michael Blankenship a écrit : > > Dear Lilypond Power-users, > > I have a question in the form “can lilypond do this?” And I’m desperate > for a clear answer. I know nothing about using LilyPond, but I do have some > experience with Music21. I have a very complex (but super interesting!) > notation workflow producing graphics for my PhD thesis in Music Theory at > Eastman that I would love to be able to automate as much of as possible. > I’m a Sibelius user, and I just don’t know what LilyPond is capable of, and > while I’m willing to put in the work for a solution, I’m on a deadline and > don’t have time to learn a whole new workflow only to discover that it > doesn’t work. So I'm really just looking for a "yeah, you could totally > streamline your transcription process with LilyPond" or "no, it does not > have the functionality you're looking for." > > Basically, I've worked out a way to represent the sounds of words as music > using a system of notation I developed that maps vowels onto a staff and > puts little colored brackets (I call them headphones) around notes to > represent clusters of consonants. I made an enormous Illustrator doc with > rows of noteheads with every possible combination of consonant headphones > available in English (there are only about 10 categories of consonants, > represented by 6 colors and some changes in shape). The way I have been > doing transcription is initially in Sibelius, where I've made a custom > 12-line staff with proportional note spacing and horizontal beaming, > exporting from Sib as an .svg to Illustrator, and then I go in and replace > every notehead by hand with the correct bracketed notehead from my big > Illustrator collection. > > But the system is actually designed to be easy to work into an algorithm. > It's pretty easy to automatically produce a phonemic transcription of > lyrics (which would always have to be hand checked, but is still a lot > faster). There are only 46 phonemes in the Standard English, so from the > phonemic transcript and the rhythmic transcript, it shouldn't be that hard > to write a process for placing the note in the correct staff space and > attaching the correct headphones to it. But there's another complication, > which is the staff has a subtle graphic design as well (which I've been > doing by hand in Illustrator). The lines vary in thickness, so the thickest > lines are at the top and bottom, and the thinnest are in the middle; and > the lines follow a stepped gradient of greyscale, so the top line is the > lightest grey, and the bottom line is black. I've attached an image of the > staff with every vowel note represented. Most of them don't have > headphones, but the r-colored vowels have a light blue headphone on the > right side, indicating the /r/ sound after the vowel. > > So, can LilyPond help me with any of this? Or is it too much? > > Thanks so much, > Michael Blankenship > > Hello, > > The attached source file (a quick hack), with PDF result, should > demonstrate that this kind of things is completely possible using LilyPond. > > If you are starting a large-scale project, it is recommended to learn > LilyPond and Scheme first. The tutorial will help you for the LilyPond part: > > http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/learning/ > > and this chapter of the Notation manual will be particularly important to > you: > > http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/notation/changing-defaults > > as well as the whole extending manual: > > https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/extending/ > > There is also a good resource around Scheme used inside LilyPond: > > https://scheme-book.ursliska.de/scheme/index.html > > This list can help with all sorts of specific problems. It won't be the > first challenge we tackle. > > Best, > Jean >
