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Lyrics with slightly different rhythms


From: Don Blaheta
Subject: Lyrics with slightly different rhythms
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:59:25 -0500
User-agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i

I'm having a hard time getting LilyPond to do just what I want here.
It's actually not that different from the "Jurassic Park" example given
in section 5.11.5 of the manual: I have a song whose rhythm varies
slightly to accommodate the lyrics in a second verse.  The given example
has wholly different rhythms, but in mine, out of 32 measures there are
just two places where one note is split in two.  (I'm using LP 2.5.0, as
distributed via Fink for MacOS X.  I don't think that's relevant, but if
what I'm describing are LP bugs rather than just me not understanding,
let me know and I'll upgrade.)

When I tried just duplicating the whole melody, I got pages and pages of
warnings about "too many clashing notecolumns".  Even after I narrowed
down the alternate melody to its minimal form (along with lots of spacer
notes), I still got clashes for the notes I specified.  Contra what
seems to be happening in the example, this method just overprints the
corresponding notes (completely obliterating the original line); see
first example linked below.

Then I tried just using melismata as suggested earlier on the page.  It
seemed to basically work in the first case (f8 ~ f); in the second,
using tilde produced something really bizarre that slurred together the
whole line; using a formal slur (d4.( f8)) worked better and set into
something that looked nice, at least.  (See second link.) But it's not
really correct.  In the one-syllable version, I want that to be a half
note on D; I only want the eighth-note F when it's needed for an extra
syllable.

For my third attempt, I tried to play with the polyphony features, and
I'm having a heck of a time getting those to work right with the lyrics.
If I use straight-up polyphony with anonymous << >> blocks, I can
associate lyrics to voices 1 and 2 for the *first* instance, but I can't
seem to access the second.  (Third link.)  And when I try to
actually use \associatedVoice, the first instance goes fine, but it cuts
off the verses at the second rhythmic change and completely re-sets the
music to be all squished together.  (Fourth.)

And when I go ahead and actually name the contexts, the layout becomes
tractable again, and the lyrics are in the right place, but we're back
to clashing notecolumns and simply overprinting the other parts.
(Fifth.)  Since I originally wanted the second part to have smaller note
heads anyway, I thought maybe I'd just A) make them smaller and B)
manually perturb the note heads.  But while I can use \set fontSize to
solve the first problem, I haven't yet figured out what to poke to make
the note head and stem all move together.  (I guess I could separately
add the same offset to NoteHead and Stem, but that seems unsatisfactory.)

Thanks for any advice you can give... I love the program, I'm a longtime
LaTeX user, and I'm definitely looking forward to using LP as its
equivalent for music engraving. :)

Ex 1: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/altmelody.ly
Ex 2: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/melismata.ly
Ex 3: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/poly1.ly
Ex 4: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/poly2.ly
Ex 5: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/poly3.ly

-- 
-=-Don address@hidden<http://www.blahedo.org/>-=-
"Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization,
the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can
write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also
it helps to be tall, but you can't do anything about that."
                                                        --Joel Spolsky




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