Lilypond and Alternative Music Notations:

Information for Users

Note that our enhanced version of Lilypond cannot currently be installed by the average user since it is not available as a precompiled binary package like the standard Lilypond application. Linux users who have experience with compilation may be able to successfully compile and install our enhanced version from the source code.

So the following information is for those advanced Linux users, developers, and others who are curious about how it currently works from a user's perspective. Most of the content on this page comes from contributor Kevin Dalley's website. See Information for Developers for more technical documentation.

Eventually we would like to add this support for alternative music notations to the standard Lilypond application. Then access to these features would be as simple as installing Lilypond on your platform of choice (Windows, Mac, or Linux).

We would welcome help with this effort. If you are interested, please contact us.

 

Using the enhanced Lilypond application to transnotate music into an alternative notation

Assuming you had already installed a working copy of the enhanced Lilypond application (see Information for Developers), here is how you would use it to transnotate music into an alternative notation.

1. You will need a Lilypond music file (.ly) in standard Lilypond format, in a form similar to bach-invention-09-common.ly. The LilyPond website explains how to write such files from scratch. You can also download them from the Mutopia project or other online sources.
2. You will need a copy of the chromatic.ly file which contains the definitions of various alternative music notation systems.
3. You will also need a template file like this one: bach-invention-09-template.ly
4. Open the template in any basic text editor and change the following line to refer to your Lilypond music file:

   \include "bach-invention-09-common.ly"

5. Next edit the following line near the top of the template so it refers to your desired notation. (See below for a list of notation system names that can be entered here.)

   #(define notation-style "6-6-tetragram")

6. In the template, change these lines to define how many octaves your music covers.

   #(define lower-octave -2)
   #(define upper-octave 1)

7. In the template, the following should be edited so they are appropriate for your file. You can add another voice, or another staff, but should consult the LilyPond documentation for details on this.

   \VoiceOne
   \VoiceTwoNoClef

8. Now open the template file with the modified Lilypond application. It should output your music file in the designated alternative notation.

 

Here is a list of notation names that can be entered in the template in step four above. Each name corresponds to a particular notation system (or "notation-style"). Note that many of these are not fully implemented and are only approximations or first steps towards full support of a given notation system. For more on this, see our overview, Lilypond and Alternative Music Notations. This list is defined in the chromatic.ly file, see Information for Developers.

6-6-tetragram (6-6 Tetragram by Richard Parncutt)
a-b (Albert Brennink's Ailler-Brennink notation)
ailler (Johann Ailler's 4-line notation)
5-line (a basic 5-line chromatic staff)
frix (Grace Frix's 5-line chromatic staff)
avique (Anne & Bill Collins' Avique notation)
mirck (Klavar, Mirck version by Jean de Buur)
twinline (Twinline, by Tom Reed)
twinline-2 (Kevin Dalley's experimental version of Twinline)
beyreuther-untitled (Johannes Beyreuther's Untitled notation)
isomorph (Isomorph notation by Tadeusz Wojcik)
kevin (an experimental notation by Kevin Dalley)
express (Express Stave notation by John Keller)

 

Note that your music file may need to be slightly edited beforehand to produce the desired result. For instance, when Kevin transnotated J. S. Bach's Invention 9 into various notation systems, he had to make a few changes to the original file that he had downloaded from the Mutopia project. For the most part, the note section remained the same. However, the lower staff in the original switched between bass and treble clefs, which he had to modify before transnotating. Here is his slightly modified file for reference: J.S. Bach's Invention 9.

Eventually we would like to create a simple front-end application with a graphical user interface to handle most of these steps. Then the user would not have to directly edit the template file at all. The user could be presented with a window where they could specify the music file, select the desired notation system, define a few parameters like the number of octaves required, and click a button to transnotate the file with the modified Lilypond.

If you would like to help contribute to this work, please contact us.