Re: suggestions for new features (wishlist)

[Mats Bengtsson]

Mind-boggling ideas! Sounds like good topics for a couple of
research projects in Artificial Intelligence. 

address@hidden said:
> I have recently started using lilypond and contributing to the mutopia
> project.  While typing up music I came up with a few suggestions for
> possible improvements to lilypond (or maybe seperate add-on packages).

> automatic finger numbering.  depending on the instrument, this might
> be able to guess which fingers go on which notes and add them to the
> .ly file.  a lot of times this is done on piano music and can be quite
> tedious.  of course that leads to the question of whether finger
> numbering can be algorithmically determined or is more of an art.

How about the liability for people breaking their fingers while
trying to follow the fingerings?

> difficulty rating.  Provide a .ly file as input and determine how
> difficult the file will be to play.  this would be useful for informed
> downloading of music from (soon to be) comprehensive music archive
> sites such as mutopia.

I've seen programs that take a piece of text and determine some 
kind of readibility index. Some aspects are not too hard to find
out from the file - speed of fastest notes, use of large intervals,
uncomfortable keys (instrument dependent), number of simultaneous
notes (for piano music). The rhythmical complexity is a common 
source of problems in contemporary music, I wonder how you could 
measure that? In information theory, there are methods to determine 
the randomness of a sequence; that might be an approach.

  /Mats