Instructify

While trying to score for “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” as a duet for flutophone and ocarina I found an open source application called LilyPond that handles the messy job of transcribing music notation. Lilypond handles anything from a simple one-line melody to a symphony or oratorio. That includes not only basic things like lyrics, accidentals, and multiple staves, but polyphony, divisi lyrics, expressive marks, grace notes, instrument-specific notation, scoring for bagpipe, and ancient notation. (If you’ve always wanted to arrange Gregorian chants for bagpipe, this baby’s for you!)

To use LilyPond, you type special notation into a simple text editor, then save and compile the file. LilyPond then outputs beautifully scored, professional-looking sheet music in PDF format. You have to code the music as if you were a programmer, though, using special notation. That can be daunting at first, but the manual is clearly written and thorough (a surprise for open-source software) and the system is fairly easy to pick up. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” would look something like this:

\relative {
\time 4/4
c4 c4 c8. d16 e4
e8. d16 e8. f16 g2
\times 2/3 { c8 c c } \times 2/3 { g8 g g }
\times 2/3 { e8 e e } \times 2/3 { c8 c c }
g’8. f16 e8. d16 c2
}

If you read music, you can probably read this notation without too much trouble. You can see the output file here.

Unlike some very expensive applications on the market, LilyPond doesn’t let you play in your music on a keyboard, and you can’t play it back to hear how it sounds – all LilyPond does is write it down for you. But it can handle anything an amateur musician or composer would reasonably need, and the price is certainly right for a teacher’s budget. -DAVID WALBERT

LilyPond

Photo credit: selva on flickr.com