Re: random music

[Mike Solomon]

For what it's worth...

I do a lot of exactly this: aleatoric composition in Lilypond.  My "seven
pieces for seunge hye", which is somewhere on www.apollinemike.com/mike,
uses this in pieces 1, 4, and 6.  My most recent piece, "Norman (12 ans) à
la dernière répétition avant sa Bar Mitzvah", also does a fair bit of this:
it is not posted online, but I'd be happy to share the code with you if
you'd like.

I use Python for all of my aleatory and have Python spit out
lilypond-parseable code.  There is no good reason for this aside from the
fact that, for me, thinking creatively in Python is easier and faster than
thinking creatively in Scheme.

I have also learned that everything I want to do in Python is, with elbow
grease, possible somehow in Scheme (to date).  My rule of thumb is that I
only write in Scheme when it comes to lilypond development, and I only do
lilypond development when I want to help others or create a new feature, and
I only do the latter when there is truly truly no other way of making it
happen in lilypond without writing something new AND I have time AND I am
confident that I will use it in more than one piece AND I am confident that
others will use it as well.  Everything else is done in Python because
Python rocks.

~Mike

On 7/20/10 6:17 PM, "Martin Tarenskeen" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm thinking of writing a little fun application based on "Mozart's
> Musikalisches Wuerfelspiel". The idea is to compose a 16-bar Waltz using a
> pair of (virtual) dice and a table of musical fragments.
> 
> I already wrote such a game for Mup ( I you have Mup, go
> to http://linux.martintarenskeen.nl and look for "mupsdice" )
> 
> And long ago I had this version of the same game on my old Atari ST:
> http://tamw.atari-users.net/mozart.htm
> 
> Now I want to try to write a Lilypond version. I'll probably use Python to
> do it. If I have the time. Don't wait for it, I'll let you know if I ever
> finish it :-)
> 
> But thinking about this little project I was wondering: Would it be
> possible to write a lilypond input file, using just pure Lilypond syntax
> and some Scheme magick, that would produce a different score each time you
> process it with Lilypond? I don't know much about scheme programming, but
> a short google search tells me it has some support for random numbers.
> 
> Aleatoric composition using Lilypond ... maybe a nice challenge for
> Lilypond/Scheme developers and power-users ?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music