🚀 go-pugleaf

 
In article <3978@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ralphw@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Ralph Hyre)
quotes me out of context, then follows with his own comment as follows:
>>She also composes, using a music-score processor. she uses the mouse in
>>one hand to place notes on staves, and the keyboard under the other to
>>select which kind of note the mouse will leave.

>Why not use a real piano-style keyboard for this?  It's hard to get more
>natural, unless you have no piano experience.  or a MIDI guitar, or
>anything MIDI interfaceable that you can easily attach to most
>computers.  For editing, it should be sufficient to point at the
>note with the mouse and change it.

If you'd bothered to read all of my original posting you'll see that that
tool is available to her, but she chooses not to use it for that specific
task.  Creating sheet music is too different from creating music. When you
create sheet music, you are interested specifically in how the symbols
look on the page.  It is much easier to directly put the symbols where you
want them than it is to play a note, and hope it goes in the rght spot.
The vertical placment is solely a function of pitch, but the horizonatal
placement is a function of the typesetting requirements of all the verses
of lyrics and also of esthetics.

The time domain data is much faster to specify with the typewriter
keyboard than it is in the time domain itself.  With the mouse and
typewriter keyboard system you can get whole notes on the page much faster 
than you would play them.  (You could fix this by adding a foot pedal,
that adjusted an on-screen display of tempo.)

Note, I've directed follow ups to the user interface group.