Re: Automatically realize figured bass

[David Kastrup]

Malte Meyn <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi everybody,
>
> a few weeks ago my father asked me whether there is a tool that
> automatically realizes figured bass (I think you say “realize” for the
> act of composing the right hand accompaniment, don’t you?). I didn’t
> know such a tool, so I wrote a simple one in Haskell but this wasn’t
> clever enough (worked only under certain preconditions, used
> backtracking instead of something faster, didn’t weight solutions by
> their “goodness”, etc.). But now I have several ideas how to improve
> such a tool (represent chords as vertices in a graph, edges are
> weighted (unison/octave parallels get a very high score etc.), then
> find the best solution using the Dijsktra or Bellman-Ford wayfinding
> algorithm, …).
>
> I don’t know whether such a tool could be implemented in LilyPond
> itself (as an engraver?) or it would be better to write a separate
> program (like lilypond-book/musicxml2ly/…). In the latter case, I
> think we would be relatively free in the choice of a programming
> language ;)

I think an approach in LilyPond/Scheme would be nice (take a look at
GOOPS whether it could help with abstracting the stuff into classes).
The main advantage is that you can let it do figured bass on-the-fly,
and also work with \displayLilyMusic for getting back a pondable
representation.

> Would someone on this list be interested
> • to use such a tool if someone implemented it?

I don't think I usually have numbered bass material here.

-- 
David Kastrup