Re: Suggestions for participating institutions?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 03/26/2013 06:27 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
> It might even make sense to try getting Steinberg on board.  They have
> just acquired the old Sibelius developers.  Now the focus I see for
> LilyPond itself is bringing it into line for operating it with a growing
> corpus of public domain music.  We'd bring in music academic partners
> for the sake of entering music into a MusicXML based database.  We'd
> want to move to a Mutopia 2 web framework that makes it easy to check in
> music in either LilyPond or MusicXML form.

This sounds like something well worth pursuing.

However, a note of caution -- building this kind of conversion functionality
into LP and other software, and building a MusicXML archive of public-domain
music, are unlikely in themselves to be things that would excite a research
funding organization.

If you want to secure research funding, the main part of the proposal should be
on the things it is possible to do _on top_ of such functionality and archival
material -- you can see this very clearly in the call which is talking very much
about media/device use, user interfaces, interactivity, etc. etc.

In other words your starting point has to be a pitch for what you want students,
teachers, etc. to be able to _do_, the _functionality_ that you want them to
have and the ways in which it will be beneficial educationally.  And you need to
bear in mind that some of our ethical concerns and desire to free music, etc.,
are unlikely to be worthwhile considerations for the funding body.

That's not to say you can't provide them, it's just that the focus of the
project proposal should be on the factors which are of research interest, and
these technical details should be a (probably minor) part of the proposed
delivery mechanism.