hal (11/17/82)
A friend of mine in Cornell's Computer Services department is trying to help
our music department find software for editing and printing music. The note
below summarizes what they are looking for. If you know about anything that
would be useful, or even know where we should look for information about such
things, please send a note to me directly. If there is sufficient interest,
I will summarize the results and post them to net.music. Thanks.
Hal Perkins
uucp: {decvax|vax135|...}!cornell!hal
arpa: hal.cornell@udel-relay
bitnet: hal @ crnlcs
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People in the music department are looking for a faster way to create/edit
music than writing everything in by hand. Theses in the music department are
50% music on average, and changing the music parts at the whim of the thesis
secretary is a chore. Writing out the music in the first place takes literally
months.
They and we are exploring possible packages/systems that we might use, and
thinking of writing our own if nothing currently available fits the bill.
Whatever we decide on must be expandable to include everything a music writer
might want: key signature macros, automatic spacing of notes within measures for
N parts, music keyboard input, figured bass notation, dynamic markings, etc.
We don't care what it runs on, as long as we can interface it to our graphics
equipment (TEK 4027, HP 7221, TEK 4013). We'd like to place emphasis on the
requirements of scholarly musicians: being able to write accidentals, optionally
parenthesized or followed by a ? above a particular note, before we're able to
add dynamics automatically, for example. We'd like some facility for adding and
editing text (lyrics) to the scores. We want print-quality copy.
We'd like to draw experience, suggestions (and funding) from as many sources
as possible. Right now we're just trying to find out everything that's avail-
able, and to find anyone else with an interest in an application of computers
that's long overdue.