[PD] [OT] Music Notation in linux

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2012-03-05 à 09:07:00, Lorenzo Sutton a écrit :
> On 05/03/12 01:43, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> Le 2012-03-03 à 22:54:00, Lorenzo Sutton a écrit :
>> 
>>> You can create a midi output, with all the drawbacks and benefits. As far 
>>> as I know there is no lilypond "player", but to be totally honest I'm not 
>>> sure it would make so much sense as lilypond is primarily a music 
>>> typesetting language.
>> 
>> Do you also mean it doesn't make much sense to use PureData for anything 
>> else than audio ?
> No, nor I see the logic by which you assume I mean that from the above 
> statement.

Think of sentences like « It doesn't make much sense to use X as a Y 
because X is primarily a Z »...

>> And computers were only meant for doing math, too.
> Indeed they are.
> And I don't think "math" is anything dirty, with less dignity than other 
> disciplines, or to be ashamed of.

I'm not alluding to that, I mean how computers aren't often used to 
explicitly doing math, whereas in the 1930's, the most newfangled user 
interface of the computer was a paper tape on which you'd punch 
machine-language directly, and you explicitly put numbers in and got 
numbers out, if you turned the crank for long enough.

Nowadays, numbers are still all over the interface, but they're not 
necessarily seen as numbers. This is what allows the numbers to become 
pixels and sound samples, for example.

> Computers are very powerful, yet stupid, calculators. In fact in Italian 
> we still use the word "calcolatore" to address a computer.

The word «computer» is even stupider, as it's the same root as «counter», 
french «compteur». A computer is just a counter. At least calcolatore 
implies it could do other math than just count !

> And of course 'computer' itself stems from the French "computer", and in 
> turn from the Latin "computare". [1]

I think French never had «compute(u)r», it had compte(u)r with a silent p 
written only to make it look like latin (the -er suffix is verb, the -eur 
suffix is noun). This dropping of «pu» in French is where English's 
«counter» comes from. French also has a quite rare word «comput» (without 
suffix and without corresponding verb), which might have inspired the 
English word, though it's also possible that English took it directly from 
Latin.

(But the word for «computer» in French is entirely different : in the 50's 
or 60's, «ordinateur» got coined using an metaphor of sorting things out, 
putting *order* into things.)

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