Re: "Parallel music view" - inspiration for LilyPond editors.

[Francisco Vila]

2012/10/3 Janek Warchoł <address@hidden>:
> Imagine a piece for medium-sized orchestra (10 instruments, 200
> measures).  In LilyPond code, you have to write the instruments
> separately from each other - the connection between them is not
> visible.  It is difficult to visualise how they blend by looking at
> the source code (i'd say it's like trying to visualise a polygon when
> all you have is a matrix with coordinates of its vertices).  Anyone
> who can effortlessly do this has my respect, but for me it's very
> uncomfortable, and i'm sure many people feel the same.
> That's why i'd like to have my code formatted in a way that is
> visually similar to the actual score.  As i've explained earlier, i
> think it's not feasible to do such formatting by hand - that's why i
> believe it's something that Lily editors could do.  And they could
> allow to switch between "regular" and "horizontal" formatting.

Firstly, let me say (if it has not been said before) that this is
asking for editor features, not lilypond features. Human-readable
plaintext code is one-dimensional by nature, whereas music notation is
bi-dimensional, so what you need is a bi-dimensional editor if you
want to match the multi-part paralellism of the music and the lilypond
code that represents it.

I think that what you want does actually exist, and it is called a
spreadsheet. They are commonly used for (or primarily intended for)
numbers and formulae laid out in rows and columns, although people do
use them for pretty everything from "I lost my dog" ads to restaurant
menus.

For orchestral or choral music, I can imagine an extension to
libreoffice calc which lets you to write music top to down by a
measure a row, in as many columns as voices or staves you have. An
horizontal scroll where measures are columns is also possible but max
number of columns is more limited (not sure about this). You'd name
the columns, write your music in a measure a cell, click a button or
press a key shortcut and the macro could create named = {expressions}
and put them into a << simultaneous music >> construct.

-- 
Francisco Vila. Badajoz (Spain)
www.paconet.org , www.csmbadajoz.com