Thursday, January 19, 2006

I am testing Open Office 1.1.2 on Mac OS X 1.4. I haven't added to my site for the past month because what I have published has been on my blog rather than on my website. So, I am just playing here for now. I had to force this paragraph to be one font type and size, it had mysteriously changed in the course of composition.

Speaking of composition, I have tried several music notation programs for the Mac, looking for ones that were simple and free. I found some good ones, but the best so far is Dememo. Its interface is actually the best designed. It doesn't force one to specify each note value and duration separately as do some programs, but it depends on lillypond and generates music-XML. The only bad thing is that it can't play MIDI directly. One has to save a separate notation file and MIDI file and play the MIDI separately. Still, it is good enough to tell me that writing intelligible counterpoint is far more difficult than it seems. I am amazed that I can process and remember much of something like Bach's “Art of Fugue” and yet writing simple species counterpoint is so difficult.

One of the features I wish these programs had is a macro facility based on melodic fragments that one can do well-known transformations on. There is one Java library I have seen that does this. Maybe the promise is that something can be done in the music-XML to select a melodic fragment and transform it through the usual musical transforms of inversion, retrograde, augmentation and inversion and combinations and to create followers for canon. One could compose a figure, set it off with a bracket notation and copy with transform to a different place in the part.