Re: Organization of vocal scores

[Laura Conrad]

>>>>> "Benedict" == Benedict Singer <address@hidden> writes:

     Benedict> My issue is that when I'm looking at the score to make
     Benedict> corrections or tweaks, I mentally reference things
     Benedict> based off the words. Lilypond, however, bases it off
     Benedict> the notes, and so every time I want to change something
     Benedict> I need to find the notes that the words are associated
     Benedict> with. It gets worse when I need to do something in all
     Benedict> 4 voice parts, as I need to find the same point in 4
     Benedict> different note collections. I could put comments
     Benedict> throughout the notes sections indicating where various
     Benedict> points in the lyrics are in relation to the notes - is
     Benedict> this the best/only way to link them? 

I think the simplest answer to this is to use the point-and-click
interface.  That way, no matter how you've structured your lilypond,
you click on a note or a word, and go to the spot in the lilypond file
where that note or word occurs.

I use this interface with Linux and emacs-22.  I'll be happy to answer
any questions about how to set that up, but I'm not an expert in the
way it works for any other system.  The documentation is a little
sketchy, probably because nobody else is expert in anything more than
setting up the system they actually use either.

For a number of practical and historical reasons, the way I actually
deal with the problem is by writing my vocal music in ABC, and using
abc2ly to turn it into lilypond.

In ABC, the words are associated with the notes:

X:1
T:Row, row, row your boat
M:6/8
L:1/8
K:C
  C3  C3  | C2  D    E3  |  E2   D   E2  F  |   G6 |
w:Row row row your boat, gen- tly down the stream
   c    c   c   G    G   G  |  E    E   E  C    C   C |
w: Mer- ri- ly, Mer- ri- ly, Mer- ri- ly Mer- ri- ly,
   G2  F E2   D | C6 |]
w:Life is but a dream.

And whitespace is ignored, so it would be possible to make the
association visually even more compelling:

   C3  C3  | C2  D    E3  |  E2   D   E2   F  |   G6 |
w: Row row   row your boat,  gen- tly down the    stream

This interfaces badly (or not at all) with using the point-and-click
interface, but I'm making progress on setting up a set of templates so
that I can just extract the notes and words from the abc2ly output
file and use a good lilypond structure.  If anyone would find my
extractnotes.py python program useful, I'd be happy to post it.

-- 
Laura (mailto:address@hidden , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (501) 641-5011
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139