Tantacrul
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2021–2024
19:40 · 609K views · Jan 15, 2021
Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.
HN recommends it as an entertaining look at how hard notation fonts are to make, and it comes up in threads on music engraving and open source.
6 comments from Hacker News
That's really interesting. I don't envy anyone who had to do music engraving prior to the usage of computers, so hats off to you and thanks for your contributions. Musical notation is such a complex, intricate, system and even with computers it's still a challenging thing to get right. I've used several different notation programs over the years and most of them make me want to scream and cuss over how un-intuitive they are compared to hand-writing a score. There is so much complexity and specificity required of the tools. No doubt you've probably heard of Tantacrul and his Youtube channel. Watching him pick apart the design issues of every major notation software really highlights just how hard it can be to get this right. His channel occupies a nice niche at the intersection of music composition, design, and programming. Also his videos are entertaining as hell. I particularly enjoy his video about the making of a new notation typeface. He does a good job at making the topic of music notation come to life, and also throws in a short history of the program 'Score' for some context: this video
Tantacrul’s video about the creation of the new engraving font ( this video ) is also an important story about the MS-DOS Score program, software obsolescence and stewardship, and the loss of value that can happen when an industry relies on proprietary software. Without polemics or politics, this ends up presenting one of the strongest moral arguments for open source licensing.
That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting. It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful. If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties. (I don't want to take away from anyone on the Sibelius team, they're likely even better experts on the subject than Tantacrul is, but as far as I know, they didn't make long-form Youtube videos about the topic! He also likely got the job of leading the MuseScore redesign thanks to his previous videos that critiqued and reimagined the interfaces of music composition software... including older versions of Sibelius [2] and MuseScore [3]) [0] this video [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how incredibly difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this: I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have no overlap, with the top/bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation. [0]: this video
If anyone's curious, here are Tantacrul's entertaining videos on MuseScore and designing MuseScore's new font, and the Audacity video from yesterday: [LINK] this video [LINK]