Well, let me give my take on this.
- Can Lilypond draw your staff symbols? Yes, but you will need to write a new print function for the staff. We already have the interface for changing the number of lines in the staff;
that is no problem. Right now, the print function prints all the staff lines the same thickness and color. But there is a hook for changing the function that creates the staff, so you can do that. This is a one-time cost that I think shouldn’t be too hard.
- Can the headphones be added? Yes, as a special markup. You could even put the markup on a layer behind the note, and tweak the dimensions of the markup so that it wouldn’t be thought
to collide with the note, even though it overlaps. Again, this is a one-time cost that is a little bit harder than the first one, I think.
I think LilyPond could easily do both of these things. I don’t know how the durations and beams work, but making these two changes would not affect LilyPond’s layout engine.
I think you should go for it. LilyPond will be way better than modifying Sibelius output.
Carl
From: lilypond-user <lilypond-user-bounces+carl.d.sorensen=gmail.com@gnu.org> on behalf of Michael Blankenship <blankens10@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, October 23, 2020 at 11:23 AM
To: "lilypond-user@gnu.org" <lilypond-user@gnu.org>
Subject: ! Please answer interesting functionality question for PhD Diss
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
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