Re: Type setting chord analysis

[Valentin Villenave]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Aura Kelloniemi
<address@hidden> wrote:
> FYI, Lilypond makes my life very easy - I don't even want to imagine
> how difficult it would be to teach my assistant how to read and write
> braille notes...

Certainly. Many of us wish that LilyPond had the native ability to
actually produce Braille scores. Some work has been done towards this
goal, but it never was achieved.

> Could I (and how could I) write a command that could automagically
>  circle and
> annotate a single note at once? Like this:
> { d'4\ant }

Well, since this command would take a text argument anyway, maybe
you're better off using a simple "markup" (as we call text annotations
in Lilypond):

\circle d'4-"ant"

Oh, wait. There is, actually, something already implemented in
LilyPond that does just what you need: please read
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.13/Documentation/notation/outside-the-staff#balloon-help

(Your note-heads will be enclosed in a rectangle instead of a circle,
but it's really easy and straightforward to use. The numbers allow you
to specify if you want the "balloon" text to be placed above or below,
on the right or on the left.)

> However, I find Lilypond documentation a bit hard to understand at some
> points, this is because I'm not very familiar with Scheme (or other Lisp
> descendants), and mostly because I don't understand the concepts associated
> with note writing (there are no stems, staves, beams or heads in braille
> notes).

I didn't know that. LilyPond is entirely built on this concept that
there are several contexts contained in one another: a Voice inside a
Staff inside a Score, etc. I hope that you'll get your head around it;
if there anything you can think of that we could do to make it easier
for blind users to understand, please do let us know!

> My annotations should refer to a particular voice, when that particular
> voice contains a nonchord tone, and to the whole harmony in all other
> cases.

That's why I'm sure that "balloons" are definitely what you need: a
balloon adds text above or below the note, with a line indicating
exactly which note it refers to. For instance, your "ant" command from
above could be defined as follows:

ant =
\balloonGrobText #'NoteHead #'(3 . 4) "This note is an anticipation"

{ \ant d'2 }


Balloons are not handled by default, so if you choose this method,
please make sure to add this at the beginning of your score:

\layout {
  \context {
    \Voice
    \consists "Balloon_engraver"
  }
}

> My assistant pointed out that with three voices on the same staff the
> stems of the notes cause problems. If I understood correctly, the
> original scores have only one stem for all the notes that start at the
> same
> moment (or the stems are connected, or something similar. I'm sorry, but
> I
> don't understand stems very well). Is this possible in Lilypond?

It certainly is. In your \score { } block, instead of using
<< \soprano \\ \alto >>
(which creates two different Voices), try adding
\new Voice { << \soprano \\ \alto >> }
which will create only one single Voice context, and then "squash"
your polyphony into it. (Not very elegant from a coding point of view,
though; as I said before, I'd personally rather have two Voices on
each Staff: as a pianist, I prefer to play two voices with each hand.)

Good luck!

Valentin.