[PD] Musical notation object on Pd

[Ed Kelly]

> Since there are already some projects going through in this area (e.g. pwgl or 
>inscore), wouldn't it
> make sense to try to integrate with these, or try to help them, instead of 
>reinventing the wheel?


Perhaps, but consider this:

The performer I am working with is a percussionist, and excellent at 
sight-reading music. However, he's not by any stretch of the imagination a 
programmer, and the idea of giving him command-line compilation issues to deal 
with, or complex connectivity between packages, would kill the project straight 
away. From me he needs to receive, via email, a PD patch that will just work. If 
other libraries are "wrapped" into PD i.e. externals are made and integrated 
into a future PD-extended, then these might provide some practical options for 
me to work with classical musicians who aren't programmers (and the majority of 
them are not). However, for the time being I am limited to that which can be 
rendered by the current PD-extended straight out of the (in)box, without any 
modifications to the computer it is running on.

That is why I'm building a system that uses just GEM and a truetype font, which 
can be made into a single package and distributed to the performer of my piece. 
If I had institutional support perhaps I could envisage something more complex 
to work, but I have been unlucky in that respect. I could either give up, or try 
to find a practical solution that works both for me and for a non-computer geek 
classically trained player. I choose the latter because I want to make music.

Best,
Ed