About Denemo
Table of contents
What is Denemo?
Denemo is a music notation program for Linux and Windows that lets you rapidly enter notation for typesetting via the LilyPond music engraver. Music can be typed in at the PC-Keyboard, or played in via MIDI
controller, or input acoustically into a microphone plugged into your computer's soundcard.
Denemo itself does not engrave the music for printout - it uses LilyPond which generates beautiful sheet music to the highest publishing standards. Denemo just displays the staffs in a slim and efficient way, so you can enter and edit the music efficiently.
Unique to Denemo are methods to enter music in a musical, rather than mechanical, manner. This can be used for transcribing scores. In an ideal world we would just 'play in' the music, but this cannot be done reliably. We would not enjoy playing in music in such a mechanical way that a computer could reliably detect the rhythm. Instead, Denemo allows you to use the numeric keypad as a kind of rhythm instrument - you play in a phrase or two of the music using the number keys to indicate the note durations. Audible feedback lets you hear what you have entered; playing the phrase a second time on a real instrument adds the pitches to the rhythm. Again, Denemo gives you audible feedback so that you don't enter E-flat when you meant D-sharp etc. You have to play the right notes in the right order, but the your timing can be as sloppy as you like.
The name Denemo is thought to be a corruption of the French word dénouement. From Wikipedia: In literature, a dénouement (IPA:/de?nu?m??/) consists of a series of events that follow the climax of a drama or narrative, and thus serves as the conclusion of the story. This would mean the pronounciation has to be French, but all other ways have been heard, too. To (double-)quote Denemo's developer Jeremiah Benham: But it in the spirit of Linus Torvalds, "I don't care what you call it, just as long as you use it."
Sample Output
Here is some sample output in PDF format
- Lead Sheet: A song (La Vie En Rose) with chord symbols.
- Trio Sonata from the late 18th century.
- Pavana & Galliarda Dolorosa A polyphonic keyboard masterpiece with title page, table of contents and critical commentary, Source.
- Sonata for Violin & Basso Continuo
Features
Input
Denemo offers many ways of inputting notation to fit your personal style
- Load .denemo files, import midi, lilypond and musicXML
- Support for MIDI Instruments, keyboard or mouse.
- Import PDF files for transcribing from. Links can be placed in the music to points in the original.
- Any function can be (re-)assigned to any keystroke, keystroke combo, MIDI signal or mouse movement.
- Choose what your keyboard does
- Select a duration first
- Insert notes of a specific duration directly
- Create a rhythmic layer first that can be filled with pitches
- Choose pitch by note names
- or move a cursor with your arrow keys
- Combine the above in any combination
- Many functions to alter and modify existing notation. Transpose, shift, augment, diminish, randomize, sort etc.
Educational
You can use Denemo to produce and make tests and games about your musical knowledge.
- Create exercise sheets
- Aural Training
- Note reading
- Playing Exercises
Output
Your music can produce prints, images and music files as well routing your music in real time to other applications. Denemo is What You See Is What You Mean. You can concentrate on your music without fighting the layout, which Denemo/Lilypond does for you in a beautiful way once you generate a PDF or print.
- PDF Generation for print. This is the main feature.
- Image export for snippets or full scores.
- Export as audio file
- Playback with an internal sampler in real time.
- Route your midi or audio data to other applications (e.g. with JACK)
Special Features
- All kinds of historical or special notation. For example figured bass, historic noteheads and barlines, Jazz/Pop chords, Guitar/Bass/Lute tabs and many more
- NotationMagick: Various commands to generate music randomly, from text, numbers, patterns. Also modifies existing music with shuffling, sorting, transpoing etc.
- Scripting Interface - Create macros by recording your commands or write sophisticated functions in Scheme
- Integrate Lilypond text and commands directly into the musical structure. Even if a feature is not directly supported you can still get it by simply inserting the Lilypond text.
Whats next?
There is a Roadmap where we write down our ideas.
Credits
- Maintainer: Richard Shann
- Jeremiah Benham
- Nils Gey
- Matthew Hiller (originator)
- Adam Tee
Contributers and special thanks to
in alphabetical order:
- Edgar Aichinger, for OpenSuse packaging and patches
- Till Hartmann, for Ubuntu packaging and scripting help
- Torben Hohn, for making the Denemo display zoomable.
- Jan Nieuwenhuizen, for creating and helping with GUB, our Windows cross-compiling system of choice.
- M Joonas Pihlaja, for fixing and helping with Cairo
- Roy Rankin, Fedora issues
- Matthias S., for the internal Script Editor Window
- Daniel Wilckens, for various commands and scripts
Translators
Full translation is not possible at the moment, because many strings are not properly marked, and a translation method for the Guile/Scheme based commands is not ready.
We need you! Join the team!
Please contact us! if you are able to program? Or you know a great deal of music (theory)? Or maybe you could develop Denemo to make it feasible to translate it to other languages?