Software News

In January Andrew Wagner  set up a Git repository to help organize and facilitate future work on adding support for chromatic staves to Lilypond.  The most recent version of Kevin Dalley’s code is now hosted there, including the Mark Hanlon’s updates to it. This will make it easier for developers to work with the code, keep it compatible with newer versions of Lilypond, and eventually contribute our code back to the official Lilypond application.  Read more about it on the repository’s wiki and our Lilypond and Alternative Notation Systems page.  A big thank you to Andrew for his work on this!

In other software news, a third application for Klavar notation has been brought to our attention.  It is called  KLAVAR!, and has been added to our Software page where it joins  KlavarScript and Klavar Music Writer.  KLAVAR! was originally written in GFA Basic for the Atari ST.  Marco Mascioli has started work towards porting it to MS Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.  He is affiliated with the KlavarScore website.

Website News

We have moved our blog from Google’s Blogger software over to WordPress.  This reason is that Blogger will be dropping support for FTP publishing on March 26th. While working on the blog, our webmaster was inspired to give our site a visual refresh in terms of its design/layout.  Here is a screen shot of the old layout just for the record:

A screenshot of the old site layout.

In addition to the revised layout, our site’s Intro (home) page has been streamlined and improved.  The text in each section is now more concise, but with the option to reveal more discussion on each topic, according to the visitor’s interest.  An audio clip has been added to let viewers hear the chromatic scale illustrated at the top of the page. (This uses the new HTML5 audio tag in browsers that support it, or reverts to Flash for those that do not.  We will be moving to this approach for all audio on the site, reducing compatibility issues and making it more accessible for our visitors.)

The Music Notations section of the site has also received various refinements including making it clearer that the notation systems are ordered primarily by line spacing, and then by the number of lines per octave.

Community News

Our new wiki is off to a good start.  It now has eleven pages that have been created by members of our community since it was launched back in November of 2009.  Our Forum (Google group) membership has broken into the triple digits with 107 members, and we now have 153 fans of the Music Notation Project on our Facebook page (at the time of writing).  (See Community.)

We are pleased to announce the Music Notation Project Wiki, a new addition to the Community section of our website. Like the MNMA‘s quarterly newsletter (Music Notation News), and our Forum (Google Group), this wiki will provide a means for our community to share ideas, knowledge, proposals, examples, experiments, images, and sheet music for alternative notation systems.

Our forum already provides an easy way to share and discuss such material and keeps a chronological archive of posts that can be easily searched. However, the wiki will complement the forum and the rest of our site by providing a more robust platform for collaborating and topically organizing this community-generated content. Organizing this material in the wiki will make it more accessible to new visitors browsing our site, and increase the breadth and depth of content available on our site.

Our wiki runs on the same open-source MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, and so its interface may be familiar. However, our wiki’s purpose is not to provide another comprehensive encyclopedia. It is to simply provide a collaborative space in which to collect and organize the content being created and shared by our community.

Over the long term, the most significant role of the wiki may be as a place to collect examples of sheet music in alternative notation systems. Building such a collection will make it much easier for anyone to really experiment with various alternative notation systems (and ultimately start using them).

Please feel free to contact us if you would like to contribute to the wiki and need help getting started. We look forward to seeing the wiki grow with your help. Let us know what you think.

In case you haven’t seen them, check out the following notation systems that have been added to our website in recent months.

Numbered Notes (notes-only and numbers-only versions) by Jason MacCoy

MacCoy’s system is notable for its staff with lines that are a minor third apart. Although this possibility has been discussed, to our knowledge this is the only system that has implemented it. As its name indicates, Numbered Notes emphasizes the use of numbers for identifying pitches. More information on Numbered Notes is also available from the Numbered Notes website.

Express Stave (6-6 jazz font version) by John Keller

This is a version of Keller’s Express Stave that has a 6-6 pitch pattern through a variation in the slant of the noteheads. Half of the noteheads are sharply slanted while the other noteheads lie flat. This 6-6 pattern is “overlayed” over the 7-5 pitch pattern found in the solid and hollow noteheads, making it one of only a few systems that represent both (other examples are Diatonic Twinline by Leo de Vries and perhaps 6-6 Tetragram by Richard Parncutt).

TwinNote by Paul Morris

TwinNote is Morris’ version of Twinline by Leo de Vries. It is similar to the versions of Twinline by Reed and Keislar, but uses solid-oval and hollow-triangle notes to highlight the 6-6 pitch pattern and make notes easier to identify. This is also similar to Sotorrio’s Bilinear notation. Using solid-ovals gives quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, (etc…) a more consistent appearance when switching back and forth from traditional notation. More information is also available on the TwinNote Music Notation website

Expanded TwinNote by Paul Morris

Expanded TwinNote is designed as a companion notation for use with TwinNote. They share the same line pattern and solid-or-hollow notehead pattern making it easy to read either system interchangeably. The only differences are TwinNote’s vertically compact staff and use of triangular noteheads.

The Music Notation Project now has a public profile on Facebook. This will help us connect with more people and build awareness of our organization and its mission.

To visit our public profile, follow the link under the new Community heading on our website. If you are a Facebook user we encourage you to show your support and help spread the word by becoming a “fan” of the Music Notation Project. To do this simply click the “become a fan” link on our public profile. You might consider inviting any friends you think would be interested to become a fan as well.

Here are some quotes from the Facebook website about public profiles:

“A Facebook public profile gives a voice to any public figure or organization to join the conversation with Facebook users. Since November 2007, bands, sports teams, artists, films, brands, non-profits and businesses have been using public profiles (formerly called Pages) as free, customizable presences on Facebook.“

“As a Community or Non-Profit, with Facebook public profiles, you can create an authentic connection with current and potential supporters, students, alumni and donors. There are already over 100,000 non-profits, universities and religious organizations using Facebook to stay connected to their constituents.”