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Music engravingMaking sheet music may seem trivial at first ("you print 5 lines, and then put in the notes at different heights"), music engraving, i.e. professional music typography, is in another ballpark. The term `music engraving' derives from the traditional process of music printing. Only a few decades ago, sheet music was made by cutting and stamping the music into zinc or pewter plates, mirrored. The plate would be inked, and the depressions caused by the cutting and stamping would hold ink. A positive image was formed by pressing paper to the plate. Stamping and cutting was completely done by hand. Making corrections was cumbersome, so engraving had to be done correctly in one go. As you can imagine this was a highly specialized skill, much more so than the traditional process of printing books. The following fact illustrates that. In the traditional German craftsmanship six years of full-time training, more than any other craft, were required before a student could call himself a master of the art. After that many more years of practical experience were needed to become an established music engraver. Even today, with the use of high-speed computers and advanced software, music requires lots of manual fine tuning before it acceptable to be published. When we wanted to write a computer program to do create music typography, we encountered the first problem: there were no sets of musical symbols available: either they were not available freely, or they didn't look well to our taste. Not let down, we decided to try font design ourselves. We created a font of musical symbols, relying on nice printouts of hand-engraved music. It was a good decision to design our own font. The experience helped develop a typographical taste, and it made us appreciate subtle design details. Without that experience, we would not have realized how ugly the fonts were that we admired at first. The figure above shows a few notable glyphs. For example, the half-notehead is not elliptic but slightly diamond shaped. The vertical stem of a flat symbol should be slightly brushed, i.e. becoming wider at the top. Fine endings, such as the one on the bottom of the quarter rest, should not end in sharp points, but rather in rounded shapes. Taken together, the blackness of the font must be carefully tuned together with the thickness of lines, beams and slurs to give a strong yet balanced overall impression. Producing a strong and balanced look is the real challenge of music engraving. It is a recurring theme with many variations. In spacing, the balance is in a distribution that reflects the character of the music. The spacing should not lead to unnatural clusters of black and big gaps with white space. The distances between notes should reflect the durations between notes, but adhering with mathematical precision to the duration will lead to a poor result. Shown here is an example of a motive, printed twice. It is printed using both exact, mathematical spacing, and with some corrections. Can you spot which is which? The fragment that was printed uses only quarter notes: notes that are played in a constant rhythm. The spacing should reflect that. Unfortunately, the eye deceives us a little: the eye not only notices the distance between note heads, but also between consecutive stems. The notes of a up-stem/down-stem combination should be put farther apart, and the notes of a down-up combination should be put closer together, all depending on the combined vertical positions of the notes. The first two measures are printed with this correction, the last two measures without. The notes in the last two measures form downstem/upstems clumps of notes. We hope that these examples show that music typography is a subtle business, and that it requires skill and knowledge to produce good engraving. It was our challenge to see if we could put such knowledge into a computer program. |
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