Developer(s) | David Kastrup, Werner Lemberg, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Jan Nieuwenhuizen, Carl Sorensen, Janek Warchoł, et al. [1] |
---|---|
Initial release | 1 August 1997 |
Stable release | |
Preview release | |
Repository | |
Written in | C++, Scheme, Metafont, PostScript, Python [4] |
Operating system |
|
Size | 20–100 MB |
Standard(s) | EPS, MIDI, MusicXML, PDF, PS, SVG |
Available in | Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish |
Type | Music software, scorewriter |
License | GPL-3.0-or-later [6] |
Website | lilypond |
LilyPond is a computer program and file format for music engraving. One of LilyPond's major goals is to produce scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules, reflecting the era when scores were engraved by hand.
LilyPond is cross-platform, and is available for several common operating systems; released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, LilyPond is free software and part of the GNU Project.
The LilyPond project was started in 1996 by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen, after they decided to abandon work on MPP (MusiXTeX PreProcessor), a project they began collaborating on in 1995. [7] [8] Its name was inspired both by the Rosegarden project and an acquaintance of Nienhuys and Nieuwenhuizen named Suzanne, a name that means lily in Hebrew ( שׁוֹשַׁנָּה ). [9]
LilyPond 1.0 was released on July 31, 1998, highlighting the development of a custom music font, Feta, and the complete separation of LilyPond from MusiXTeX. [10]
LilyPond 2.0 was released on September 24, 2003, announcing a simplified syntax model and a much more complete set of facilities for notating various styles of music. [11]
LilyPond is mostly written in C++ and uses Scheme (interpreted by GNU Guile) as its extension language, allowing for user customization. [12] It has a relatively large codebase; as of March 10, 2017, the source includes over 600,000 lines of C++, 140,000 lines of Scheme, and 120,000 lines of Python code. [13]
It uses a simple text notation for music input, which LilyPond interprets and processes in a series of stages. [14] In the final stage, music notation is output to PDF (via PostScript) or other graphical formats, such as SVG or PNG. LilyPond can also generate MIDI files that correspond to the music notation output.
LilyPond is a text-based application, so it does not contain its own graphical user interface to assist with score creation. (However, a text-editor based "LilyPad" GUI for Windows and MacOS is included by default on these systems.) It does, however, have a flexible input language that strives to be simple, easing the learning curve for new users. LilyPond adheres to the WYSIWYM paradigm; the workflow for typesetting music notation with LilyPond is similar to that of preparing documents with LaTeX.
LilyPond supports experimental musical notation. Its guitar facilities support alternative tunings, such as major-thirds tuning. [15]
LilyPond's primary goal is to produce output comparable to professionally engraved scores instead of output that looks mechanical and computer-generated. An essay from the LilyPond website, written by LilyPond developers, explains some typographical issues addressed by LilyPond: [16]
The native input language for LilyPond is comprehensive, and consists of many commands needed for expressing any sort of articulation, dynamic, meter, etc. It is similar to that of TeX. The ability to embed Scheme code within a LilyPond source file permits arbitrary extensions to the input language and assists with algorithmic composition. Some general syntactic features are listed below.
%
. [18] a'4
is an A, one octave up from the base A (A3 in scientific pitch notation), of quarter note length. [19] \time
, or \slurUp
). The function of the command in question determines where the command is placed; for example, if the command is used to indicate a fixed dynamic on a specific note, it is placed after the note. [20] (
and )
indicate the beginning and ending of a slur, respectively. [21] Another example is with manual beaming, where [
and ]
indicate the extent of the beam. [22] LilyPond's interface with Pango requires the input character encoding to be UTF-8. [23] One benefit of this is that more than one language can be included in the same source file.
\version"2.22.2"\include"english.ly"\header{title=\markup{"Excerpt from"\italic"fibonacci"}composer="Patrick McCarty"% copyright = \markup \fontsize #-5 % {% Copyright © 2009.% Typeset with GNU LilyPond.% Released into public domain by the composer.% }}\paper{paper-height=4.6\inpaper-width=8.5\inindent=#0system-count=#2}\score{\newPianoStaff="pianostaff"<<\newStaff="RH"\relativec'{\accidentalStyleScore.piano \clef"treble"\time2/4\setScore.currentBarNumber=#51\tempo"Slow and steady"4=60<egs,>4\acciaccatura{cs16[ds]}<egs,>4|% m. 51<dsgs,>4\acciaccatura{e16[ds]}<csgs>4|% m. 52<csgs>4\acciaccatura{ds16[cs]}<cg>4|% m. 53<csgs>4\acciaccatura{ds16[e]}<esbsgs>4|% m. 54<egs,>4\acciaccatura{cs16[ds]}e16fgsa|% m. 55<gsc,>8\acciaccatura{as16[gs]}<esb>8~<esb>16dsbas|% m. 56b16d8bf32f'g16afbfc|% m. 57<dfdf,>16(caf)<e'e,>(dsb)<g'g,>(ds|% m. 58\time3/4<gsgs,>16)\noBeamd,16fgsa16efbc16d,(fgs|% m. 59a16b)e,(fgs16bc)f,(gs16asbc)|% m. 60}\newDynamics="Dynamics_pf"{s4\p\<s4|% m. 51s4s4|% m. 52s4\mp\>s4|% m. 53s4s4\!|% m. 54s4\ps4|% m. 55s1*2/4|% m. 56s4\<s4|% m. 57s4s4|% m. 58\overrideDynamicText.extra-spacing-width=#'(-0.75.0.75)s16\mfs16\ps8s4s4|% m. 59s2.|% m. 60}\newStaff="LH"\relativec,{\clef"bass"\time2/4cs4.cs8|% m. 51cs4.d8|% m. 52f4.a8|% m. 53f4.d8|% m. 54cs4.cs8|% m. 55d4ds|% m. 56gs4.bf,8|% m. 57f'4b,|% m. 58\time3/4d4.d8~d4|% m. 59ef2f4|% m. 60}>>}
Lilypond can also create extensively customised output. An example is the short extract of a Karlheinz Stockhausen piano piece below.
Several graphical scorewriters—such as Rosegarden, NoteEdit, Canorus, Denemo, and TuxGuitar—can export files directly to LilyPond format. Other graphical applications serve as front ends to LilyPond, including Frescobaldi and the LilyPondTool plugin for jEdit. Denemo integrates the PDF output of LilyPond in its display, allowing some editing operations on the final typeset score.
The Mutopia Project, which distributes free content sheet music, uses LilyPond to typeset its music, as does Musipedia, a collaborative music encyclopedia.
Emacs' org-mode contains support for embedding LilyPond scores into documents. [24]
OOoLilyPond, a LibreOffice extension provides support for calling LilyPond to embed scores into documents. [25]
Lilypond is available in MediaWiki via the Score extension code. This, for example, transforms the notation
<scoresound="1">\relativec'{ \keyd\major fis4fisgaagfiseddefisfis4.e8e2}</score>
into
The above is an excerpt from Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, commonly known as "Ode to Joy". More complex scores, including lyrics, are also possible within MediaWiki wikis.
Integration of LilyPond musical elements into various document formats (both TeX-based systems such as LaTeX and Texinfo, and also DocBook and HTML pages) is natively supported through the companion program lilypond-book, developed and maintained by the LilyPond community. [26] This allows users to embed musical elements within texts, such as musicology, song booklets, work sheets for teaching, and school examinations.
For integration into the LaTeX document preparation system, lyLuaTeX has been developed as a LuaLaTeX package to embed musical elements within texts. It includes features for matching layout and appearance of the musical elements with the surrounding text document. [27] Music elements may consist of music symbols, song lyrics, guitar chords diagrams, lead sheets, music excerpts, guitar tablatures, or multi-page scores.
Finale and Sibelius are two proprietary scorewriters often compared to LilyPond. Andrew Hawryluk, a LilyPond user, wrote a series of articles comparing output quality between Finale and LilyPond. [28]
Another scorewriter with comparable features to LilyPond is SCORE, but SCORE relies on manual positioning more than Lilypond does.
See also Comparison of scorewriters.
A scorewriter, or music notation program is software for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they typically provide flexible editing and automatic layout, and produce high-quality printed results.
Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for Linux with ALSA, JACK and Qt4. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter, and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free alternative to such applications as Cubase.
Music engraving is the art of drawing music notation at high quality for the purpose of mechanical reproduction. The term music copying is almost equivalent—though music engraving implies a higher degree of skill and quality, usually for publication. The name of the process originates in plate engraving, a widely used technique dating from the late sixteenth century. The term engraving is now used to refer to any high-quality method of drawing music notation, particularly on a computer or by hand.
The numbered musical notation is a cipher notation system used in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and to some extent in Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and English-speaking Canada. It dates back to the system designed by Pierre Galin, known as Galin-Paris-Chevé system. It is also known as Ziffernsystem, meaning "number system" or "cipher system" in German.
MusiCAD is a scorewriter program originally designed for folk music featuring irregular meter and automatically generated accompaniment voices (bass/chords) from chord symbols and specified time signature. Created lead sheets are audibly verifiable. One of its design goals was to be as predictable as possible: 'what-you-write-is-what-you'll-hear'. The resulting music engraving is the result of the notes used and an applied set of rules that determine how notes should be drawn. After changing the layout parameters or after transpose the (new) rules are applied, perhaps changing page layout completely.
Denemo is a scorewriter and music sequencer. Denemo has been under development since 1999.
NoteEdit is a defunct music scorewriter for Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems. Its official successor is Canorus.
Inverse search is a feature of some non-interactive typesetting programs, such as LaTeX and GNU LilyPond. These programs read an abstract, textual, definition of a document as input, and convert this into a graphical format such as DVI or PDF. In a windowing system, this typically means that the source code is entered in one editor window, and the resulting output is viewed in a different output window. Inverse search means that a graphical object in the output window works as a hyperlink, which brings you back to the line and column in the editor, where the clicked object was defined. The inverse search feature is particularly useful during proofreading.
The Werner Icking Music Archive is a web archive of liberally licensed sheet music of public domain music. The scores are electronically typeset by volunteers and distributed in PDF, often accompanied by their typesetting files. WIMA continues the defunct GMD Music Archive and is named after its founder, the late Werner Icking. After a merge completed in 2012, the archive forms part of the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP).
ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with a
–g
, A
–G
, and z
, to represent the corresponding notes and rests, along with other elements used to place added value on these – sharp, flat, raised or lowered octave, the note length, key, and ornamentation. This form of notation began from a combination of Helmholtz pitch notation and using ASCII characters to imitate standard musical notation that could facilitate the sharing of music online, and also added a new and simple language for software developers, not unlike other notations designed for ease, such as tablature and solfège.
MusiXTeX is a suite of open source music engraving macros and fonts that allow music typesetting in TeX, released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license.
GUIDO Music Notation is a computer music notation format designed to logically represent all aspects of music in a manner that is both computer-readable and easily readable by human beings. It was named after Guido of Arezzo, who pioneered today's conventional musical notation 1,000 years ago.
This is a comparison of music notation programs.
Director Musices is computer software produced by the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It aims to give an expressive, human-like performance to a musical score by varying the volume and timing of the notes. Director Musices is written in CMU Common Lisp and distributed as free software. It processes MIDI files.
Forte is a music notation program developed by the German company Lugert Verlag, located in Handorf. Its name is derived from the dynamic marking of forte. The program is available in both German and English.
In music, a two hundred fifty-sixth note, or occasionally demisemihemidemisemiquaver (British), is a note played for 1⁄256 of the duration of a whole note. It lasts half as long as a hundred twenty-eighth note and takes up one quarter of the length of a sixty-fourth note. In musical notation it has a total of six flags or beams. Since human pitch perception begins at 20 Hz (1200/minute), then a 256th-note tremolo becomes a single pitch in perception at quarter note ≈ 18.75 bpm.
Gregorio is a free and open-source scorewriter computer program especially for Gregorian chant in square notation. Gregorio was adopted by many abbeys and large projects.