Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Music21 in the Boston Globe; Lilypond

Sunday's Boston Globe has an excellent article by Leon Neyfakh titled, "When Computers Listen to Music, What do they Hear? "  which includes a great discussion of the latest techniques in computational musicology including a number of references to music21 (including a graphic only in the print edition).  Here's one of my quotes in the article:

“You get a bird’s eye view of something where the details are so fascinating—where the individual pieces are so engrossing—that it’s very hard for us to see, or in this case hear, the big picture...of context, of history, of what else is going on,” said Cuthbert. “Computers are dispassionate. They can let us hear things across pieces in a way that we can’t by even the closest study of an individual piece.”
For anyone who already knows about music21, I'd appreciate it if any Lilypond hackers/users who are adventurous would be willing to upgrade to the newest SVN and test out Lilypond support there.  We've completely rewritten our Lilypond exporter as an object-oriented system with the aim of getting it caught up to MusicXML in the near future.  It's a ground-up reconception, so there may be some bugs.  It doesn't support a lot of things still, but it's now a flexible system that we can expand in the future.

No comments:

Post a Comment