I was digging through some old backups this week, and I stumbled upon a bunch of music that I had written twelve and thirteen years ago. No, I will not inflict it on you. Much of it is so embarrassingly bad I can only laugh, but there are a few pieces I thought would be worth archiving (for my own personal history’s sake). So I downloaded LilyPond and began transcribing them.
LilyPond is free, but it is not a graphical music notation editor. I’m not into music composition enough these days to desire to spend any money on it, so “free” is about all I’ll budget for it. What LilyPond does is take text files containing (essentially) gibberish, and emit a PDF with beautifully laid out music. It’s easy! All you have to do is learn to convert your music into gibberish.
The interesting thing about this, though, is that it essentially lets you convert music into source code. Once it is in a text format, you can treat it just like any other text file, including hosting it on GitHub (or similar). So I wondered: are there any projects out there, where people have worked on a musical composition as a community, using something like git or subversion to collaborate?
I’m sure I can’t be the first that this has occurred to. And while my own musical chops aren’t up to participating in a songwriting project, I would love to follow along, all from the comfort of my command-line!
Jamis wrote this on Mar 27 2009 There are 15 comments.
Zach 27 Mar 09
Musicians Jam.
James 27 Mar 09
I haven’t seen anything with Github, but I’ve had some fun playing with the python client for EchoNest and uploaded some of my remixes on my blog – http://bit.ly/12dvM
Among other things, you can use Echo Nest to create midi files from musical notation, so this could be a way to quickly render a rough version of a composition you are collaborating on, or hear two diffs side by side.
Walker Hamilton 27 Mar 09
SoundCloud is a popular musician collaboration site, but it’s more focused on electronic musicians then musicians writing scores.
Florian Weber 27 Mar 09
SoundCloud seems great for music collaboration. Many artists use it to allow other people to do remixes of their songs. For example:
http://soundcloud.com/jazzanova-remix-contest
This looks also pretty cool:
http://www.ableton.com/share
Marcos Wright Kuhns 27 Mar 09
I think you might appreciate Noteflight. It’s a free, web-based score editor that supports score collaboration, versioning, and embedding along with the standard music notation features. Of course it would be hard to beat git on the branching/merging side of things, but a nice GUI is well worth it for me.
Evan 27 Mar 09
To help with the gibberish, you might try Canorus. It’s a graphical music editor that can export to LilyPond. I’ve used it before and it works pretty nicely.
Tony Cosentini 27 Mar 09
A little while back, Create Digital Music did a great piece on how musicians can use git to share Max patches, somewhat similar.
Christian Bryan 27 Mar 09
I certainly do! I keep all of my Pure Data patches in a git repository. It makes it really easy to keep my friends in sync when we play together and GitHub is great for publishing little bits that might be useful for other people.
On Preview: Tony beat me to it!
Austin Taylor 27 Mar 09
I keep my Lilypond files in git. It’s great for version control, but I can’t really imagine using it to collaborate. Like Zach said, musicians jam.
Chad Allen 27 Mar 09
I have actually worked on a couple of tracks with a friend on the other side of the country via SVN . We just set up Logic to export all files/sameples when saving then set up an SVN repository and treatd it just like it was a site. It worked like a charm.
Pete 27 Mar 09
Yeah, I use source control at home for all my projects – even when not collaborating. I don’t always store the raw data in there, but absolutely for session files. That way you have backups when something melts down. It would be easy and makes sense to extend this for collaboration as well. Certainly a lot more efficient than sending giant ZIP files around.
CM 27 Mar 09
I understand you’re looking for free, but Finale Notepad 2009 is almost free ($10) and offers a GUI . It offers a lot of features considering its price. I’m not affiliated with Finale in any way—I’ve just been happy with Notepad.
Christian 30 Mar 09
You could also consider looking into recording-based collaboration, rather than just sharing music sheets. I’ve had a lot of fun collaborating with others on Kompoz.com (you can take a look at crenz.kompoz.com for my page).
Xavier Shay 30 Mar 09
I recently found lilypond also, found a smattering of lilypond source on github, but no actual collaboration.
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ is a collaboration to typeset out-of-copyright music, a git repo with all of these would be awesome.
Those suggesting GUIs, you’ve missed the point. I type quicker than I click. I can use my natural editor, refactor, keep things dry.
Lilypond has a built in scheme interpretor geek out
Ryan Platte 31 Mar 09
A friend and I were collaborating for a while in 2002 on almost exactly what you describe, transcribing choral settings into Lilypond. Fun to see someone else with the idea too.
This discussion is closed.