{"id":150,"date":"2023-12-06T00:10:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-06T05:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/?p=150"},"modified":"2023-12-13T00:51:03","modified_gmt":"2023-12-13T05:51:03","slug":"hello-lilypond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/06\/hello-lilypond\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello, Lilypond"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Somewhere there’s Music<\/h2>\n
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If I can express the speed of light<\/a>, what about sound? My next quest in this adventure is leveraging org-babel<\/code> to generate snippets of music notation. Like, how difficult can that be?<\/em><\/p>\n

On my way in, I know very little. I might know a great deal about music notations, sure, but all I know of Lilypond<\/a> is two decades1<\/a><\/sup> old and even then I was more into Musescore<\/a><\/em>. What I do know of Lilypond is it is emaculately academic about notation, and that sounds like a nice thing to have.<\/p>\n

From what I (dimly) recall, it retains a latex-like feel to the notation. It can’t be any worse than CSound, which is a topic in itself. For starters, though, is it possible<\/em> to not only render some snip of score, but to have the process render and ready a MIDI? That’s the proof of concept du jour<\/em>.
\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Adventures in ob-lilypond<\/em><\/h2>\n
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I notice the ob-lilypond<\/code> module doesn’t appear on MELPA<\/code>, but perhaps that’s because it is core. I ran the following elisp as suggested on their GitHub<\/a>2<\/a><\/sup>:<\/p>\n

(org-babel-do-load-languages\r\n'org-babel-load-languages\r\n'((ruby . t)\r\n  (C . t)\r\n  (emacs-lisp . t)\r\n;;  <\/span>(sh t)<\/span>\r\n  (dot t)\r\n  (clojure t)\r\n  (ditaa t)\r\n  (lilypond t)))\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
That should probably go into my Emacs init.el<\/code> if it wasn’t already the default. Just to clarify my context, I’m running UbuntuStudio<\/em> 23.10, so KDE\/Qt based and should work fine with Rosegarden<\/em> (although I haven’t visited that app in decades). So I’ll have that and LilyPond<\/em> installed under 23.10.<\/p>\n
Given all this, the compile to PNG and upload of the media is automatic. I’m just hitting publish, then giving permission to use the local lilypond:<\/p>\n
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\"mixolydian.png\"<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
That’s in need of some serious cropping, but otherwise presents a nice face and easy to do. There’s a note tagged to the end of the org file that needs to be deleted to effect any future updates to this image.<\/p>\n
It is, however, curious and odd<\/em> none of the offered examples offer any hints on cropping<\/em> the image. The lilypond<\/code> executable command can be set in the customize-group<\/code> for org-babel, but I’m not getting the crop option<\/a>. Also suggested was adding #(ly:set-option 'crop #t)<\/code> but again, added to the lilypond block has no effect on the output, although I do see a mixolydian.cropped.png<\/code> created by the process, so the puzzle is really how to get that inserted instead of the full-page version. In the HTML example org source<\/a> I do notice they append a #+results:<\/code> line followed by the local<\/em> filename, although they don’t put cropped<\/em> in there, and putting it in did not change the published page.<\/p>\n
A cursory search suggests Lilypond folks typically use ImageMagick<\/em> to post-process a crop, but that seems clumsy within this Org2Blog process and<\/em> none of the examples given suggest anything special to be done! Also, speaking of clumsy, every time the image is regenerated, we create and upload an additional<\/em> (numbered) PNG which is then added<\/em> to the Activitypub export (to the max of 3), so here again, the ActivityPub plug makes no allowances for image corrections, even on drafts.<\/p>\n
The lilypond src block is also ignoring my caption tag, whereas I get a nice Fig. 1<\/em> when I normally include an image.<\/p>\n
Clearly not out of the woods on this just yet.<\/p>\n
The ob-lilypond example<\/a> had a preamble to define<\/em> version<\/code> and paper<\/code> that should be part of a #+SETUPFILE<\/code> somewhere.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
#+LaTeX_HEADER: \\usepackage[paperheight=4cm,paperwidth=17cm,textwidth=15cm]{geometry}\r\n#+name: version\r\n#+begin_src emacs-lisp :exports none :results silent :eval yes\r\n\"\\\\version \\\"2.12.3\\\"\"\r\n#+end_src\r\n#+name: paper\r\n#+begin_src emacs-lisp :exports none :results silent :eval yes\r\n  \"\\\\paper {\r\n\tindent = 0\\\\mm\r\n\tline-width = 170\\\\mm\r\n    oddFooterMarkup=##f\r\n    oddHeaderMarkup=##f\r\n    bookTitleMarkup=##f\r\n    scoreTitleMarkup=##f\r\n  }\"\r\n#+end_src\r\n<\/pre>\n
On posting to WordPress, I’m initially asked permission to eval every block on every print; this is known behaviour<\/a> and since the given fix didn’t work for me, I’ve set a global accept<\/em> on babel block evaluations. May the good lord have mercy on my heathen soul.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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What about Rosegarden<\/em><\/h2>\n
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This is UbuntuStudio<\/em> so I was surprised to find it not already install, but easily fixed via apt<\/code>. On install it recommends a soundfont, so I included that, but on first run<\/em> I’m told there will be no sound without Qsynth<\/em>. That gets added, run, presumably background? Rosegarden now has sound but it is very s-l-o-w<\/em> and choppy when configured for alsa and pipewire, or quasi<\/em> configured, maybe. Pipewire for a jackd<\/code> app? That will be a puzzle for another day.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, I may be fine for my first while just coding in Lilypond directly. Like, how hard could that<\/u> be?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Footnotes:<\/h2>\n
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1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n
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circa y2k<\/em> a lot of my work was documented using \\(\\LaTeX\\) generated via DocBook<\/code> xml files, for example the Linux Kernelbook Project<\/a> actually allowed me to begin an open<\/em> textbook on kernel internals, the notion being to have a living document that could be professionally published by Macmillan, translated and all that, but fundamentally online, free and current<\/em>. Unfortunately the kernel lords of the day were wont to participate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n
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I had to comment out the sh<\/code> reference, and the failure<\/em> of that run killed the Org2Blog menu. I copied the contents, quit the previous post buffer and killed this one, then started a new buffer and pasted this back in (this was before posting any drafts)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Explorations in music engraving via org-mode<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-org2blog","tag-emacs-latex-org-mode-lilypond"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":62,"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242,"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radio.teledyn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}