Re: "Parallel music view" - inspiration for LilyPond editors.

[David Kastrup]

Francisco Vila <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/10/3 Janek Warchoł <address@hidden>:
>> Imagine a piece for medium-sized orchestra (10 instruments, 200
>> measures).  In LilyPond code, you have to write the instruments
>> separately from each other - the connection between them is not
>> visible.  It is difficult to visualise how they blend by looking at
>> the source code (i'd say it's like trying to visualise a polygon when
>> all you have is a matrix with coordinates of its vertices).  Anyone
>> who can effortlessly do this has my respect, but for me it's very
>> uncomfortable, and i'm sure many people feel the same.
>> That's why i'd like to have my code formatted in a way that is
>> visually similar to the actual score.  As i've explained earlier, i
>> think it's not feasible to do such formatting by hand - that's why i
>> believe it's something that Lily editors could do.  And they could
>> allow to switch between "regular" and "horizontal" formatting.
>
> Firstly, let me say (if it has not been said before) that this is
> asking for editor features, not lilypond features. Human-readable
> plaintext code is one-dimensional by nature, whereas music notation is
> bi-dimensional, so what you need is a bi-dimensional editor if you
> want to match the multi-part paralellism of the music and the lilypond
> code that represents it.
>
> I think that what you want does actually exist, and it is called a
> spreadsheet. They are commonly used for (or primarily intended for)
> numbers and formulae laid out in rows and columns, although people do
> use them for pretty everything from "I lost my dog" ads to restaurant
> menus.

I actually have a hard time deciding whether this is intended as a joke
or not, but then the amount of things spreadsheets are misused for is
staggering.  I agree that a "parallel view" where you basically click on
several music sources is likely more feasible than actually having a
separate view for each with synchronization when we are talking about a
large number of voices.

In any case, I would agree with Janek that this is likely better done
with a specialized LilyPond editor rather than a general-purpose
spreadsheet.

-- 
David Kastrup