user interaction with notation software

[Klaus Föhl]

Hello,

The other week I was talking with a couple of music people.

Talking to Person A about upcoming concert programme, showing some
choir musicsheets I typeset with Lilypond after A had groaned about
sometimesless-than-perfect computer output. Person A was amazed about
the clarity, well readable for choir singers. Using 2.12 I had tweaked
some vertical spacing to fit the music onto one page, but most settings
like font size, font etc. were all standard setting unchanged.

Less impressed by the text-based input, even when I pointed out that
I usually cut-and-paste the header parts. Still the non-music notation
(a2 c1 d4 f) is not fully intuitive to someone who is used to see note heads.
Was interested to learn that lyrics and music, separately noted in the text
file, can then automatically be joined together.

When talking about the concept of staff and voices, person A stressed the
importance to him of the vertical context when noting orchestral scores
(beyond chords).

One thing that appealed was the possibility of variables that could be used
multiple times, and if a change to a groove were to be made, the change then
would only be necessary to be done once.

The other appealing fact was the availability for Windows, for Mac,
for Linux and for free...


Regarding Person B, I could watch some music arranging using Sibelius 6.
The melody line had been cut-and-pasted into two more staff lines,
and the arranging action was then pushing notes around with arrow keys
interspersed with music pre-listening. Setting the repeat/volta sign
seemed to be a purely graphical action, (re)aligning chord letters
required the manual nudging of every single chord letter
(but an alignment reference line was provided).

Looking for the repeat notation required some limited time for
pulldown-menu-searching. The music required some 1.2 pages initially,
but there was a menu point "squeeze onto one page" (or similarly named)
which then was envoked, music was visually checked, ok, end of this work step.

So far my two wee observations

Klaus