Re: [O] feature request (rather off-topic)

[François Pinard]

Michael Brand <address@hidden> writes:
> François Pinard <address@hidden> wrote:

>> Somewhere in my old files, I have a reference to an Emacs mode for
>> entering music visually in a kind of ASCII mode, written by Neil
>> Jerram if I remember correctly.

> I am very curios to see how this looked like and how it worked.  With
> a quick search I was not able to find it.

Hi, Michael.

I looked around a bit, and found not much in my files.  I cleaned up the
GNU Music project many, many years ago and did not keep much of it.
Even the Emacs mode (written by Neil Jerram unless I'm mistaken) did not
survive for long in the project, as we (Neil included) selected another
representation for music, still kind of 2-dimensional, but more
compactly coded than an ASCII drawing.  To edit this representation,
instead of Emacs, we wrote a specialized curses-based program.  I
surprisingly still have scanner.l, parser.y, editor.c, and a few other
files from that project, but really, this is of no interest nowadays.
In my opinion, Lilypond is immensely more appealing!

It seems that Neil Jerram, which sadly, I did not contact in ages,
remained active in the Emacs communities, you should easily find him
here and there by Googling.  I see Neil Jerram <address@hidden> in
http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/musictools/src/lilypond-2.6.3/AUTHORS.txt,
but while I think unlikely that this address is still valid, I do not
know.  You might try to reach him there or otherwise, if you are curious
enough: maybe that with some luck, he kept around some code or example?

Let me share that I remember Neil as one of the most exquisite persons I
ever worked with: it always has been a great pleasure.  The GNU Music
project underwent a long, dark episode when Richard Stallman forced a
new direction and leadership upon us, seduced at the times by the
promises of Robert Strandh, who brought the project into some moribund
state.  Han-Wen succeeded in getting the project back to life (I helped
my best), to convey what later became Lilypond.  Lilypond has been
successful to the point GNU Music is never heard anymore by that name,
and that's very OK: Lilypond goes much beyond our dreams and means. :-)

The Lilypond musical notation is quite efficient.  I often use it, with
a pen on a sheet of paper, in the need of noting some music for myself,
when away from home and any computer.  For me, it's quicker than drawing
staves and notes.  I quite suspect that Lilypond notation, combined with
the virtues of Babel, and the graphical capabilities of Emacs, might
really be the best way to handle musical scores with Org.

François