[linux-audio-user] Note typesetting for Linux

Chris Pickett chris.pickett at mail.mcgill.ca
Fri Jul 9 15:08:27 EDT 2004


Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 02:39:19PM -0400, Chris Pickett wrote:
> 
>>Michal Seta wrote:
>>
>>>Well, I must be a different race of a classical musician.  I have been
>>>trained as a classical musician and I've been trained to read the
>>>black dots with beams people call scores.  However, a score is only a
>>>representation of music.  The same music could be represented in
>>>different ways.  As a guitarist I have learnt to play from a guitar
>>>score, piano score, lead sheet, modern guitar tablature and
>>>medieval/rennaissance tablature (of which there were 2 kinds).  These
>>>are all valid representations of musical compositions and they all
>>>have strengths and weaknesses.  Any piece of music (as long as it's
>>>within the traditional 12 tone equal temperament) can be represented
>>>using any of the above methods.  So why not text?  Entering textual
>>>representation of music and following certain _markup_ rules is not
>>>programming.  If it were so, simply scoring should be considered
>>>programming, too.
>>
>>Yes, in my mind, "programming" requires the existance of conditions and 
>>(possibly backward) branches.
> 
> 
> You mean like repeat signs, multiple endings for different times through
> a section, codas, DS al capo, etc, etc?

Yes, of course, but the typesetting language _itself_ doesn't have this, 
right?  I can also do:

\begin{verbatim}
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
   {
     foo ();
   }
\end{verbatim}

in TeX, but that doesn't make it _programming_.  If TeX or the music 
typesetting stuff _does_ have this capacity, that would be interesting. 
  In fact, I think functional / procedural sequencing is pretty neat in 
itself, although I don't know much about it at all, if it leads to 
anything musical, if it's a well-known technique, etc. etc.

Cheers,
Chris



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