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