From dpsenick at uiuc.edu  Wed Jul 27 08:50:12 2005
From: dpsenick at uiuc.edu (David Psenicka)
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 03:50:12 -0500
Subject: [fomus-announce] FOMUS
Message-ID: <42E74AC4.4040801@uiuc.edu>

I'd like to announce a new project, "Fomus."  Fomus is a music notation 
tool in Lisp for computer music composers that converts "raw" musical 
data into an output file or files suitable for loading into several 
different notation programs.  The purpose is to provide a better 
alternative to current options for importing data and formatting it into 
a score.  The program tries to automate a variety of tasks including 
note spellings, distribution of notes across voices and staves, clef 
signatures, ottava brackets, combining notes and rests in multiple-voice 
parts, and (maybe one of the more useful functions) quantizing note 
offsets and durations by finding combinations of tuplets/beat divisions 
that minimize the amount of error.  Support also exists for articulation 
markings including slurs, other markings like text and dynamics, and 
some special types of notation like tremolos, harmonics (some of these 
aren't implemented yet).  It can also be used as a Common Music backend, 
and will use some of CM's functionality if present.

Fomus is still in its initial testing/development stage so many bugs 
exist, some minor things aren't implemented yet (including backends--it 
only outputs LilyPond files at the moment), the documentation needs to 
be finished, the interface needs to be simplified, etc..  This project 
grew out of a smaller collection of Lisp functions I've been using over 
the past few years to notate my own pieces.  The main website is at 
http://common-lisp.net/project/fomus/doc/ and contains instructions for 
CVS download.  At the moment the program should compile in the latest 
versions of CMUCL and SBCL on Linux and CMUCL and OpenMCL in Darwin (it 
won't compile in Darwin SBCL at the moment).  Any comments, feature 
requests and bug reports are welcome from anyone interested in using it 
and seeing it develop--there is a mailing list link on the website.

(I apologize for the cross-posting.)

-David Psenicka