from Hacker News

OMN: Scripting the whole language of traditional staff notation

by geoffroy on 9/6/15, 10:01 PM with 12 comments

  • by z3ugma on 9/6/15, 10:23 PM

    Also worth a look is Lilypond http://www.lilypond.org/.
  • by a-nikolaev on 9/6/15, 11:14 PM

    Just a sidenote that the Opusmodus software is not open source, not free, and works only on Mac.
  • by kregasaurusrex on 9/7/15, 12:55 AM

    What information does OMN contained that isn't preserved in sheet music already? I was looking at OCR tools a few months back and found OpenOMR which expresses the MIDI instruction with all of these properties.
  • by byteCoder on 9/7/15, 6:39 AM

    Looking at their score example at the bottom of the page, the right-hand score is defined as a separate entity from the left-hand score. As a result, to the OMN notation reader, it's hard to see the inherent synchrony between the two hands. This would be a bitch to debug and compose (i.e., code) without its display on a standard staff, which would show the time-ordered parallelism directly.
  • by knz42 on 9/7/15, 5:40 AM

    There's a conceptual issue with the language and a missing example: what of chords where one part of the chord is pressed longer than another? Or when one part must be staccato and another not?

    I can't seem to see how this is expressed with OMN.

  • by DanielBMarkham on 9/6/15, 11:32 PM

    It would be easy enough to write a parser for this.

    Interesting that they see it as a way to freeform new compositional ideas.

    Over the years I've tried a huge selection of music composition software. I've yet to find something that's both easy and composable. It may be, just like the CLI/GUI discussion -- plain text may win out over a lot of mousing around and clicking.

  • by djfm on 9/7/15, 5:55 AM

    Very cool! Looking forward to experiment with it. In the same spirit but less advanced (my "language" has bugs, I know) I wrote this toy project: http://sound-of-ascii.herokuapp.com/. There's a demo and you can play around with it.
  • by saljam on 9/6/15, 10:43 PM

    Does this have notation for quarter tones? I can't find that on their website.

    That's always been a pain point for me. No quarter tone notation rules out a lot, including most of Arabic and Turkish, and much of Greek maqam music.