Swing Midi

[David Greene]

Hi everyone,

I searched the archives and found a few discussions about
generating swing-feel MIDI from straight eighths Lily
source but the most recent was from 2004.

I was thinking about writing a Scheme function to carve
up all of the durations into units of eighths, inserting
the proper ties to maintain longer notes.  Then I could
imagine altering the durations as appropriate to implement
the swing feel.

Can anyone give me an idea of the complexity of this?
I can imagine writing it in such a way that the "swing
bias" can be specified (e.g. triplet, quintuplet, etc.).

I know only as much Scheme as is covered in the 2.9.17
manual, which is to say, not much.  What is the recommended
reference?  SICP?  I could do this in C++ with no problem,
but Scheme is a very different beast.  I'm not at all sure
how to do complex data structure manipulation in it.

Might it be easier to do something with Perl or a similar
text-processing language to alter the Lily source directly?
It would be nice to have a music function that others could
share.

The main reason I want to do this is not to generate
perfect-sounding music but to be able to give a new
score and accompanying MIDI to people learning new stuff.

                              -Dave