Stretching the Score

Client: Philip Hazel, PMW

Anyone who has learned a musical instrument or taken a music lesson at school is likely to have seen printed scores created with Sibelius, one of the most famous software companies to have come from Cambridge. The Sibelius tools make it very easy to print music in the way it has looked for 200 years or more, but very hard to adapt with typographic innovations that make music easier. Your goal is to create an alternative specification language and rendering chain for music notation, perhaps using standards like MusicXML and the scripting language embedded in Sibelius. Your client is also the author of a major open source music typesetting system, and you'll be welcome to experiment with or borrow from his code base.