Trustworthy Systems

Decent MIDI from LilyPond

Authors

Peter Chubb

NICTA

UNSW

Abstract

LilyPond is primarily a means to produce beautifully typeset music scores; but it can also produce MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) output for 'proofhearing' the scores. Unfortunately, LilyPond's MIDI output is not very good: it obeys the notes and any explicit metronome and dynamic markings, but that's about it. So I (Peter Chubb) wrote some scheme code that interpreted some of the more commonly used marks in a musical score. The idea was to rewrite the LilyPond input before LilyPond interpreted it, so, for example, slurs and phrases were obeyed, and trills were fully expanded.

BibTeX Entry

  @misc{Chubb_10,
    address          = {Wellington, NZ},
    author           = {Chubb, Peter},
    booktitle        = {Linux.conf.au},
    month            = jan,
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/3576.pdf},
    title            = {Decent {MIDI} from {LilyPond}},
    video            = {https://youtu.be/vEPNm2b2PRk},
    year             = {2010}
  }

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