Progam to text-label LilyPond measures (uses YAML input)

[Mark D . Blackwell]

Some music (especially some choral music) is somewhat irregular of
measure length. Naturally with this kind of music, while entering (and
editing, following one's musical sense), often measures will join or
split. Then half of the measure numbers are thrown off. This is
especially true of early music, and recent music whose source documents
were prepared somewhat in a free way.

Often, given multiple voice parts (or instruments), each, for various
purposes, necessitates several source files in parallel (if working in
LilyPond): such as for adjustments to piano or organ reductions. Many
features not yet done (completely and automatically) well by LilyPond
necessitate these additional parallel files.

Whenever information is parallel, it requires careful synchronizing of
all the measures (and measure lengths). What a bother!

Obviously, if humans are checking and synchronizing something (with
difficulty), this is a good opportunity for computers to do the work
instead. In that situation, I wrote a computer program allowing measures
to be labeled by (text) strings, instead of (only) by measure numbers.

The program fills each measure (completely) with spacer rests (unless
told otherwise). This eases synchronization, because you need only
include measures with actual content.

The program uses YAML as its data entry format. YAML's noise (the extra
characters you enter) is very spare. It seems cleanest for entering
LilyPond source (it interferes only minimally) yet allows measures to be
labeled easily by text strings.

Available on my GitHub (and written in Ruby), the program is called, <a
href="https://github.com/MarkDBlackwell/yaml2lilypond/zipball/master";>
'yaml2lilypond'</a>. Recently, I successfully used it to engrave
(typset) a large work--and it helped a lot!

I also <a href="http://markdblackwell.blogspot.com/2011/11/
text-label-your-measures-in-lilypond.html">blogged</a> the above.

The program is open-source (MIT-licensed).

If someone else maintains parallel information in LilyPond, or might
find text measure labels useful, or knows of a better way, I would enjoy
learning of it!

Copyright (c) 2011 Mark D. Blackwell.