The Void Was Listening

With thanks to Kim Bastin in Melbourne, who put it in the post.

Spring has finally arrived in Stockholm. I mention it only because there's a quality of north European light returning after winter that genuinely affects how work feels.

The past two weeks have been quiet on the Ooloi front, code-wise. I'm being onboarded into a large AWS project at work, where my decisions will eventually affect roughly five thousand developers, and onboarding at that scale absorbs a great deal of attention. What Ooloi work I've done has been architectural cleanup: the sort of small consolidations you make when the ground is about to be built on. Data field validation refactored to be entirely general, for instance. Not glamorous, but the kind of work that matters once it has disappeared from notice.

Ross also arrived this week. The 1987 third edition, posted from Melbourne in a padded envelope, in pristine condition, and now on the desk where it belongs.

Two weeks ago I wrote that I needed the book and couldn't buy it. The void was listening, as the coda noted. It is one thing to write that, and another to hold the consequences. The book is dense and beautifully exact where it counts. It's also, in places, at odds with itself, which is the honest record of any craft this old. The beaming section alone runs to fifty pages and doesn't entirely agree across them; the accidental positioning sections give horizontal spacings down to fractions of a stave space. Exactly what I'd hoped for. Translating it into data and code will be a pleasure.

What strikes me paging through is how much of the material I already know in some sense. Musicians absorb this kind of thing through a lifetime of reading and writing scores. The interest is not the content as content; it's the formalisation. Ross surfaces principles that intuition alone never quite articulates. He's rigorous about things most musicians never have to put into words, and that's where the real value sits. It's also what makes the book usable as a specification rather than as commentary.

The road ahead, briefly. The Piece Window comes first, multi-user collaboration aware from the start, built on the patterns the Instrument Library established. After that: frontend session persistence so windows reappear where you left them; the Piece Preferences window (also collaboration aware); clock skew compensation for reliable distributed undo and redo; and the full multi-mode client work, with Google-Docs-style permission management for connecting peers. That last item closes a chapter. Once it's done, I won't have to think about multi-user logic again. It'll simply be there.

Then plugins for all JVM languages, a first version of MusicXML import and export, and Skia/Skija with GPU acceleration. The last of those is when SMuFL fonts can finally be drawn on the page.

After which the rendering pipeline proper begins. The first stage draws everything except the music: page numbers, titles, headers, footers, staves, system barlines, braces, brackets, instrument names. Crucially, it's done through the plugin system itself, in Clojure plugins. If you don't like the choices, you can replace them, in whatever JVM language suits. I'm not sure it'll ever be necessary, but it can be done if so desired.

Then the interesting material: noteheads, horizontal spacing, flags, augmentation dots, multi-voice collision resolution, accidental clustering, unisons. Everything that isn't a spanner. The solver gets the supposedly easy work first.

Spanners last: beams, ties, slurs, hairpins, glissandi, lyrics, pedalling, 8vas. Where Magnus's question about hovering secondary beams will finally have somewhere proper to live.

But first: piece windows. Expect GIFs/videos soon!​