From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew H. Fields)
Subject: Re: Music notation software?
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 14:11:47 GMT

In article <1a8mijINN716@uniwa.uwa.edu.au> diarmuid@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Diarmuid Pigott) writes:
>However (having used many scoring programmes and tried to do this) it's
>never really as easy as you hoped. Things like touch and anticipation
>are completely misinterprested, and as there is some degree of
>quantising inevitable, the result may require some heavy amendations.
>
>The trouble is, midi programs lack "swing", if they're anything more
>than just record/playback machines.

The trouble is, the programs are mainly designed to do what you tell them to;
the sophistication to realize that you're doing a stylistic sophistication
which would be notated more simply than you played it is really hard to
program, and isn't always desireable.  In my music, when I lead the beat,
I want a tie from before the beat; when I swing, I want to see triplets or
quintuplets (grouped 3 + 2).

The other troubles are: 1) almost no program on the market consistently
provides the ability to provide correct, sight-readable music notation
after less than Herculean user efforts; 2) almost no program provides
a reliable, uniform user-friendly interface; 3) the few programs that meet
criterion 1 either severely limit the set of music they can notate or
fail miserably on no.2, or both, and vice-versa.

It isn't that the problem isn't clearly enough defined: engravers'
stylebooks give huge tables of solutions to problems like correct and
legible beaming, placement of multiple accidentals in front of chords
and clusters, placement of ties relative to chords and clusters, with
and without dots, etc.  But programmers and corporate execs have been
too satisfied with cheap, user-time-intensive solutions where
algorithms exist, or just plain wrong notation altogether.

One salesman harrassed me by phone and mail trying to get me to buy a
notation product on the basis of advertisements which showed a sample
of its notation.  The notation in the ads had about 10 obvious anomolies
that would make it uselss in the real world, including bad cropping of
the graphic so part of the musical text was missing, incorrect rhythmic
and pitch notation, horrendous spacing, ties that disappeared in the
stave lines, collisions of 3 or more musical symbols in the same place
on the page, etc.  One would think that the manufacturers would take
care to put their best sample forward in the ad.

While I used Score on a mainframe (the infamous Foonly) for 2 years, and
I've used Finale for 2 years, I still recommend the following notation tools:
Decent vellum paper, staves printed on the back
several sizes clear plastic triangles
clipboard and/or drawing board
stiff, clean graph paper to place behind the vellum so you can do vertical
 allignment quite easily
Pilot Razor Point waterbased pen for narrow lines
Sanford Vis a Vis Finepoint waterbased overhead projector pen for beams and
 black noteheads (and the thick bar of double-bars)
Gillette Thin Razor Blade, cut into segments 3mm wide, one such mounted on
 an Exacto knife handle, to scrape a layer of paper off for erasure, or
 off the back of the paper to remove unwanted staves or portions of staves
Sturdy thumbnail to burnish the paper down just after erasures, so ink will
 not feather in the erasure (so eat your fruits and veggies!)
light pencil and big soft erasure to make temporary help marks where necessary
 (but the use of the graph paper should eliminate the need for this)
access to a decent photocopy machine, e.g. via Kinko's Copies corp.
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose,rec.music.beatles