[jamesear]

Excuse my ignorance, I'm about to ask stupid questions.

* What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing?

* Do people typically use this to compose their own music, or are they recreating music they know?

* How similar is sheet music to source code? Does any software interpret it to output audio?

* Are there any open git repos where people collaborate on an open collection of sheet music?

* How expressive is sheet music? How constrained do you feel trying to convey your idea onto this format? Does it support abstraction, or making your own abstractions?

[turtlebits]

A lot of older classical scores have poor scans, low res, or are hand written. If I enjoy a piece, I'll redo the notation and upload it (generally to IMSLP).

I have a MIDI piano so I end up using the keys to input, which can be fairly quick, depending on the piece.

[jononor]

IMSPL looks go be https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page It seems that some uploads are just PDFs, while others include Lilypond files.

[Doctor_Fegg]

What software do you use to get the MIDI inputs into Lilypond?

(and thank you for contributing to IMSLP, one of the great commons of the internet)

[ink_13]

I have published one complete work in Lilypond which I estimate has been downloaded about 50k times (and those downloads were probably reused for multiple people, because it was an instructional work). I guess that qualifies me to answer?

* I have a background in LaTeX, so that's why I picked it up. The work I transcribed is a set of six French baroque sonatas for two violins which are commonly used in intermediate-to-advanced teaching.

* At the time I did it, there was no freely available score that showed both parts on the same page, just reproductions of the original handwritten manuscript, so I did it to have a cleaner copy where you can see both parts at the same time. I had to edit slightly because it turned out the original contained a handful of errors.'

* Very similar. Lilypond started life as LaTeX macros, and while it's now well beyond that, you can see the roots. Lilypond can output MIDIs from source.

* I don't know about git repos, but there's no reason you couldn't. I did publish the source alongside the finished PDF on IMSLP (the International Music Score Library Project, a wiki of public domain music).

* For my purposes (playing European music using the 12 tones in the traditional style from Renaissance to modern, both classical and folk), perfectly expressive. I'm not sure what you mean by abstraction in this context, but if you want to do something for which there isn't common notation, you can just write words.

I would use Lilypond without hesitation if I had a new work I wanted to publish, just as I would use LaTeX to publish a book or document. It's a typesetting system, and if you're using it, you're already committed to the form of traditional European sheet music.

[ksherlock]

I started setting up a piano blog once, which used lilypond to generate an image of the sheet music (then trimmed with image magic) and a midi file (rendered to wav with fluid synth and compressed to mp3). This would have been for small snippets (2-3 bars) of rock/pop/etc music, with some brief commentary. I guess I got distracted along the way. The output looked and sounded good though!

[dsubburam]

* What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing?

--I think people who play/practice musical instruments regularly, esp. in an ensemble, esp. in classical music (where the written notes are referred to a lot); to make arrangements, transcriptions, instrument parts, etc. out of the originals to perform for fun. I'dn't be surprised if programmer folks are overrepresented in this group. (I am one of them).

* How similar is sheet music to source code? Does any software interpret it to output audio?

--I'd like to say quite similar, but upon further thought, maybe not. e.g. In sheet music, there's no ready equivalent to functions taking arguments and returning values. Maybe the similarity is with compiled/machine code (which I am not familiar with).

* How expressive is sheet music? How constrained do you feel trying to convey your idea onto this format? Does it support abstraction, or making your own abstractions?

--It is quite expressive. Most musical material that people come up with in their minds will likely be adequately represented in sheet music. I haven't seen "user-defined" sheet music notation, which I think is what you may mean by abstractions. I suppose it could be done (and supported by LilyPond).

[araes]

> In sheet music, there's no ready equivalent to functions taking arguments and returning values.

Sounds like an interesting idea for a music major somewhere. Plus, with conductor or local condition inputs, might make for entertaining sight reading. If sunny, && morning, play notes this way : If dusk || rain, play this way : play default.

[bonzini]

I use it to typeset songs that my son wants to learn on the guitar. I can tailor the difficulty and add some "special" things based on what he's learning, for example customizing chords or changing the key signature.

I also used it to typeset a simple song that I arranged and played at a funeral service. I could have written it by hand, but given I was a bit anxious about the performance it helped to have an extremely readable version.

Writing lilypond source code is about the same difficulty as LaTeX. The midi output helps stomping out mistakes and it's easy to follow the source as it plays. Sheet music is pretty expressive, it's a good balance between showing what to play and how, and lilypond is about 1:1 with sheet music.

That said in lilypond you can add some kind of abstraction through both macros and typesetter settings. For example it can calculate automatically which frets and strings correspond to notes, and generate guitar tablature (fret+string notation) and sheet music from the same source. Also, instead of specifying by hand how to play each note, you can basically tell lilypond "I want the left hand to be roughly here on the fretboard" and that affects the strings it tells the player to pluck.

[dirkt]

* I don't know "what type of person uses this" in general, but I use it whenever I need to typeset music, which happens when I need to sing something with others. This includes be re-creating sheet music I have for better readability. I've never done any composing.

* It's not very similar to the source code. Basically you put in note names (c d e f ...) and durations (c4 e8 g8 c2). The rest is commands and markup to deal with the remaining very complex needs music typesetting has. Think Latex for music.

* I've never seen any git repos for that, but there are sites like CPDL and IMSLP that sometimes also include Lilypond source (or other sources).

* "How expressive is sheet music": I guess the easiest way to find out is to actually play an instrument or sing? It's a bit like asking "how expressive is the written word, like books and these things".

[MatmaRex]

It's used to render sheets and audio in Wikipedia articles (I hope this answers several of your questions). Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#Lyrics_and_melod...

[gpvos]

It has been used for large professional publications such as the 2013 Dutch protestant hymnal (>1000 songs, versions with and without accompaniment).

[hooo]

You ask such good questions here. I am curious about the same. The other comments provide some clues as to the answers.