[cc-community] Net Band "Packet-In" releases CC BY-SA licensed album
Michael David Crawford
michael at geometricvisions.com
Wed Mar 19 02:33:52 EDT 2008
Terry Hancock wrote:
> What I think is really the "source" for synthesized music, would be:
>
> 1) MIDI or other representation of the music notes and instruments
> 2) Instrument patch files
> 3) Tracks for non-MIDI audio
> 4) Project files for mixing of elements 1-3
> One question we were not able to answer, but I'd like to is: can you
> generate "sheet music" from #1. I.e. is there a program I can use to
> construct readable sheet music from a MIDI file?
Sort of. The Lilypond music notation program (http://www.lilypond.org/
- it's GPL) comes with a program called midi2ly that will generate
Lilypond source code (a simple text format) from midi files.
The problem is that very subtle irregularities in timing will cause
dramatic errors in the result - irregularities that a human player can't
avoid. I had the same problem years ago trying to typeset my music with
Concertware - notes would end up in the wrong measure.
This can be helped with midi sequencers that do quantization, that is,
that adjust the timing of notes to make them fall on beats, or a simple
fraction of a beat.
> And of course, can you
> do the reverse -- convert a sheet music format to a MIDI automatically?
Yes! Lilypond can do this trivially when it compiles your score source.
It will produce PDF scores, or MIDI, or both at the same time.
This is a huge help in finding subtle errors in your scores. A mistake
your eye might miss usually jumps out at you when playing the midi file.
I'm sure most scoring programs will do this.
> Strictly speaking, we don't have a
> legal "source code requirement" with the By-SA license, but I wanted the
> project to store source code for reasons of both principle and practice.
I would like to have a license variant that requires source code (for
whatever definition of source code we can come up with.) If there were
such a license, that's what I would choose for my own work.
The GNU Free Documentation License handles this by requiring
"transparent formats". However, I'm not sure I agree with its
definition of what a transparent format is; I think it requires on to be
able to edit it in a plain text editor. I would argue that binary
formats should be acceptable, so long as the format is well-documented,
and editors are available for it.
--
Michael David Crawford
michael at geometricvisions.com
http://www.geometricvisions.com/ <- Creative Commons Lilypond Scores
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