Re: Aleatoric / modern notation

[address@hidden]

On Mar 11, 2012, at 5:33 AM, James Harkins wrote:

> Possibly a common question, sorry if asked and answered before, but Google 
> failed me...
> 
> I'm considering some aleatoric notation (so-called "box notation") for a 
> piece but couldn't find info in the manuals (the "contemporary notation" 
> section of the 2.14.2 docs @ lilypond.org is empty), or in the LSR, or Google 
> searches to find out how to realize it.
> 
> By "box notation" I mean collections of gestures/phrases, enclosed in a box, 
> with an arrow indicating to keep doing that until the arrow stops. The 
> phrases could use normal rhythmic notation or proportional notation without 
> stems/flags.
> 
> Some time ago, somebody posted a link to Mike Solomon's "granini di luce 
> beccucciati da uccelli di silenzio" as an example of contemporary notation. 
> The attached pic from it illustrates more-or-less what I'm after (though I 
> wouldn't need the slash).
> 
> Thanks!
> James
> 

Hey James,

The best way to achieve that with current LilyPond is Scheme engravers.

There have been a few examples of Scheme engravers posted on this list (if you 
search Scheme engraver you'll find one - there are also examples in the 
input/regression folder of the LilyPond source).  You'd want to create one that 
begins and ends a spanner when it hears a given event (you can invent a 
BoxNoteEvent, for example) and acknowledges note columns in the interim, 
putting them in a grob-array called "note-columns" or what-have-you.  Then, 
make a print method that extracts these note columns (or whatever grobs you're 
interested in) finds the min/max height and width, and draws a box at those 
dimensions.

If you want to get fancy, you can add extra spacing width to the left of the 
first note column and the right of the last note column to make sure there are 
no collisions with the box and surrounding material.

Cheers,
MS