| * What type of person uses this? I guess the intersection of people interested in composing and people able to typeset? I would have thought it wasn't that popular, but it has the polish of a popular tool. What am I missing? --I think people who play/practice musical instruments regularly, esp. in an ensemble, esp. in classical music (where the written notes are referred to a lot); to make arrangements, transcriptions, instrument parts, etc. out of the originals to perform for fun. I'dn't be surprised if programmer folks are overrepresented in this group. (I am one of them). * How similar is sheet music to source code? Does any software interpret it to output audio? --I'd like to say quite similar, but upon further thought, maybe not. e.g. In sheet music, there's no ready equivalent to functions taking arguments and returning values.
Maybe the similarity is with compiled/machine code (which I am not familiar with). * How expressive is sheet music? How constrained do you feel trying to convey your idea onto this format? Does it support abstraction, or making your own abstractions? --It is quite expressive. Most musical material that people come up with in their minds will likely be adequately represented in sheet music. I haven't seen "user-defined" sheet music notation, which I think is what you may mean by abstractions. I suppose it could be done (and supported by LilyPond). |
Sounds like an interesting idea for a music major somewhere. Plus, with conductor or local condition inputs, might make for entertaining sight reading. If sunny, && morning, play notes this way : If dusk || rain, play this way : play default.