Limn
Limn Interactive Music Notation
Donald Craig – rhomboid@u.washington.edu
Limn : from the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. To illuminate (letters, manuscripts, books).
2. To paint (a picture or portrait); to portray, depict (a subject).
Overview
Limn is an application for the creation and display of graphical music scores. Limn can also do simple playback of sound files. The scores are created with an event list that specifies shapes, text, and images and their timing and location on the screen. This event list, “eventlist.txt,” any sound files and/or images being used are stored in folders in the Resources folder of the application bundle. The score of a given piece can thus be a standalone application. Using OSC or MIDI, the score can be altered interactively as it happening.
Graphics
The drawing and display of the score is done using Apple’s Quartz API. The shapes are simple geometrical primitives. These include a circle, triangle, quadrilateral and line. Also included are curved and wavy lines. The color can be specified and the transparency also. Most of the parameters can be controlled with an envelope. Images can be displayed. They can be resized and stretched and squashed.
OSC (Open Sound Control)
Limn can send and receive OSC messages. Received messages can start and stop the score, go to a particular time in the score, alter the speed, and set values in the control busses that can be used to affect things in the score. Sent messages can be anything. Limn does not know anything about OSC timestamps.
Plugin
For those things that a user might want to do that are difficult or too tedious to do in the score, if they can write in C, they can write a shared object file that gets loaded at initialization. Functions in this plugin can be called from the event list by name and with as many parameters as necessary.
Future Developments
Eventually, there will be realtime audio analysis that can be used to make the score interactive without the necessity of other OSC applications like SuperCollider, orMaxMSP. Included in the analysis will be amplitude, pitch, and some spectral measurements. Ultimately, there will be an interpreter. Limn will have its own small scripting language. This will eliminate the need for the plugin.
Anybody having interest in acquiring Limn should contact me at rhomboid@u.washington.edu. A download page will soon be available.
