OOLOI - Igor Engraver reborn

[PeterBengtson]

So Anders is aware of it? That's great. I haven't seen him in years; say hello from me next time you talk to him.

Anyway, some benchmark tests you might find interesting:

https://www.ooloi.org/home/a-wagner-sized-benchmark

[Roland_Gurt]

Dear PeterBengtson, dear community, I humbly contribute in this post my thoughts on contemporary notations (and in the following post my suggestions for traditional notations).

One of the best ways to gauge the breadth of contempory notation might be to go to the "ScoreFollower" YouTube channel and just look at all the thumbnails as a first impression. This is what’s actually being notated today (whereas books tend to be incomplete and lag behind in that regard).

Of course many things in these scores could be notated differently and maybe more efficiently. Go to Playlists → Popular to see mostly works by well-known and established composers. For some especially noteworthy scores, may I recommend this notat.io-thread where "reference scores" across genres were compiled, including contemporary ones, such as the works of Lachenmann (Breitkopf), Crumb (Peters, hand-written by Crumb), and Stockhausen (James Ingram).

I then thought about how one could condense all those notations into few powerful and flexible tools, which together could handle maybe 90% of scores that would otherwise have to be done/finished in external software like Illustrator. Feel free to add or comment on these:

• ability to simply hide, as well as move, rotate and scale any element on the page (without it affecting the spacing)

• ability to have custom staff types (no. of lines and distances) and change between them at any point as well as start and end staves (or switch to "0-line staff") anywhere

• ability to create custom clefs, custom noteheads (incl. clusters), custom dynamics, custom playing techniques/symbols

• arbitrary stem decorations (tremoli, Sprechstimme, buzzroll, multiphonic, custom – see also the respective SMuFL collection

• ability to put parentheses or square brackets around noteheads, accidentals, tuplet ratios, dynamics, time signatures, fingerings, articulations, rests, fermatas, ornaments

• a solution for boxed notation

• dynamic footnote creation is not currently offered by any scoring software as far as I'm aware

• an advanced line tool, including:
  • line endings (arrows and others)
  • line bodies (dashed, dotted, wavy, incl. a parameter to modulate randomly to create diverse "noise" lines (because these are just so ubiquitous)
  • have text follow the line
  • choose any two anchor points for a line to attach to (e.g. notehead, end of stem, center of stem, rest, staff line, bar line, other elements) – this would also enable creating wavy or "angled" beams (cf. Cage "Freeman Etudes", Holliger, Czernowin) by attaching modulated lines to ends of stems.

Most of these capabilities would also benefit engravers working in other fields (such as early music, critical editions, educational).

Appendix: examples for angled and wavy beam styles (which are particularly tedious to achieve):

Holliger-Double-Concerto-wavy-beams.jpg (100.83 KiB) Viewed 2210 times

Organ-pedals-solo-extended-beaming-styles.jpeg (206.78 KiB) Viewed 2210 times

Cage-Freeman-Etudes-angular-beaming.jpeg (77.75 KiB) Viewed 2210 times

[Roland_Gurt]

Now on the topic of more traditional notations that are not easily achievable with existing software:

For big scores (and the corresponding parts) where you want to achieve a very compact layout (like in all the classic scores), it can take ages to nudge rehearsal letters, tempo texts, dynamics and staff text into a tight arrangement. In traditional orchestral scores, it is the norm (and not an exception) to see dynamics placed (partially) inside the staff or before the beat, text markings before the beat ("con sord." etc.) and so on (can be seen e.g in Strauss "Elektra" from the beginning (IMSLP Link)).
I could imagine a setting for "extra-tight spacing" that could do this automatically, along with an easy way to toggle line breaks in tempo texts on a per-layout basis.

Another wish would be the native handling of concurrent ternary and binary meters (as often seen in the repertoire), like global 2/4 with one staff switching to 6/8 and back. This is common practice since the renaissance period and regularly used by great composers ("Jesu, Joy" being one of the most well-known examples, but it's also extensively used in Wagners operas, among many other examples).

Optical sizes (like automatically having proportionally thicker staff lines for smaller staff sizes, thicker stems for grace notes, etc.) are currently mostly only possible in lilypond (described on their website here and here).

Advanced handling of 8va-lines has been requested before.

The effect to "white out" the background behind text, dynamics, time signatures and similar items (difficult to achieve on hand-engraved plates?) would be very welcome.

Some more special notations which would be great to have supported: (collected by Donald Byrd, probably well known by most members here) https://web.archive.org/web/20240629181 ... ation.html.

Best regards,
Roland

[Shinianqi]

This is an excellent summary, Roland — many of these ideas really resonate with me, and it’s the first time I’ve seen them all brought together like this. I believe it will be very helpful for everyone, especially for those developing software, even though implementing all of this won’t be easy.

[ttw]

I used a demo version of Igor some 30 or so years ago, but I don't remember much. I settled on Encore (until it died) and then Finale (until it died). I never really got Sibelius. I seem to want something quite different from what Dorico provides. I am trying to learn Dorico and Musicscore.

I am interested in using such a program to compose music more complex than I can play. I want to edit a score easily. It's like applying diminutions on the fly. I want to change something in the middle (or extremities) of a score and have the rest of the score adjust automatically. These programs are useful for composition, not just engraving.

[Magnus Johansson]

I used a demo version of Igor some 30 or so years ago, but I don't remember much. I settled on Encore (until it died) and then Finale (until it died). I never really got Sibelius. I seem to want something quite different from what Dorico provides. I am trying to learn Dorico and Musicscore.

I am interested in using such a program to compose music more complex than I can play. I want to edit a score easily. It's like applying diminutions on the fly. I want to change something in the middle (or extremities) of a score and have the rest of the score adjust automatically. These programs are useful for composition, not just engraving.

Igor Engraver was created to be not only for engraving but for composition also and that shows of course first and foremost in its user interface. You can still try out Igor Engraver on modern computers via CrossOver, see https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibili ... ngraver-17.

[sugarfree]

And after almost 30 years, there are technical solutions available to solve these problems that nobody in engraving is using yet, because of legacy issues. It's high time for a re-imagining.

Peter, if I may, have you considered an AI engine for the UI? There are many cases where I wish I could just tell Dorico to perform certain transformations or formatting, which are otherwise tedious and time consuming. If not an integrated AI, then a comprehensive API to connect an external LLM would be very useful.

[PeterBengtson]

Sugarfree - that would be extremely easy to add via a plugin, actually. Having AI help would be very useful, and it would be able to use the underlying API easily.

On that note, here's a new blog post outlining an input method I thought every other notation program had copied by now – but nobody has, and it was one of the unique features of Igor Engraver at the time - Flow Mode:

https://www.ooloi.org/home/ooloi-flow-mode-revelations

[PeterBengtson]

Dear PeterBengtson, dear community, I humbly contribute in this post my thoughts on contemporary notations (and in the following post my suggestions for traditional notations).

One of the best ways to gauge the breadth of contempory notation might be to go to the "ScoreFollower" YouTube channel and just look at all the thumbnails as a first impression. This is what’s actually being notated today (whereas books tend to be incomplete and lag behind in that regard).

Of course many things in these scores could be notated differently and maybe more efficiently. Go to Playlists → Popular to see mostly works by well-known and established composers. For some especially noteworthy scores, may I recommend this notat.io-thread where "reference scores" across genres were compiled, including contemporary ones, such as the works of Lachenmann (Breitkopf), Crumb (Peters, hand-written by Crumb), and Stockhausen (James Ingram).

I then thought about how one could condense all those notations into few powerful and flexible tools, which together could handle maybe 90% of scores that would otherwise have to be done/finished in external software like Illustrator. Feel free to add or comment on these:

• ability to simply hide, as well as move, rotate and scale any element on the page (without it affecting the spacing)

• ability to have custom staff types (no. of lines and distances) and change between them at any point as well as start and end staves (or switch to "0-line staff") anywhere

• ability to create custom clefs, custom noteheads (incl. clusters), custom dynamics, custom playing techniques/symbols

• arbitrary stem decorations (tremoli, Sprechstimme, buzzroll, multiphonic, custom – see also the respective SMuFL collection

• ability to put parentheses or square brackets around noteheads, accidentals, tuplet ratios, dynamics, time signatures, fingerings, articulations, rests, fermatas, ornaments

• a solution for boxed notation

• dynamic footnote creation is not currently offered by any scoring software as far as I'm aware

• an advanced line tool, including:
  • line endings (arrows and others)
  • line bodies (dashed, dotted, wavy, incl. a parameter to modulate randomly to create diverse "noise" lines (because these are just so ubiquitous)
  • have text follow the line
  • choose any two anchor points for a line to attach to (e.g. notehead, end of stem, center of stem, rest, staff line, bar line, other elements) – this would also enable creating wavy or "angled" beams (cf. Cage "Freeman Etudes", Holliger, Czernowin) by attaching modulated lines to ends of stems.

Most of these capabilities would also benefit engravers working in other fields (such as early music, critical editions, educational).

Appendix: examples for angled and wavy beam styles (which are particularly tedious to achieve):

Holliger-Double-Concerto-wavy-beams.jpg
Organ-pedals-solo-extended-beaming-styles.jpeg
Cage-Freeman-Etudes-angular-beaming.jpeg

Roland, these are all important considerations. I should mention that I've recently designed the graphical layer in such a way that arbitrary graphical manipulations a la Illustrator should be possible. That's not difficult. The difficult part is maintaining their musical meaning, something we will have to return to. But hiding, moving, scaling, rotating, skewing should all be possible. Whether that suffices to support "rubberband beams" remains to be seen. You other proposed tools such as the line tool are straightforward as graphical elements. There will be support for most of the things you mention, such as parens round noteheads and other graphical symbols. At this point I can't promise to cover all your requests, but I'll not forget, and I'm looking forward to a detailed discussion about all these things as soon as things start appearing onscreen, which is fairly soon.

[PeterBengtson]

https://www.ooloi.org/home/the-lineage- ... es-shorten