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Technology report

Generating musical scores with LilyPond

Thanks to a new MediaWiki extension, editors can now use the popular LilyPond format to embed musical scores in articles. The "Score" extension, created by Alexander Klauer (GrafZahl), renders musical scores in LilyPond score notation as PNG images, and can also transform those scores into audio and MIDI files automatically. An example of the extension's output, together with the corresponding LilyPond markup, is shown below:

\relative c'' { \time 4/4 \key c \major 
  c4 g8 g a4 g r b^> c^> r \bar "|." } 
  \addlyrics { Shave and a hair -- cut: two bits. }
<score midi="1">\relative c'' { \time 4/4 \key c \major 
c4 g8 g a4 g r b^> c^> r \bar "|." } 
\addlyrics { Shave and a hair -- cut: two bits. }</score>

More details on the options provided by the extension can be found on its help page and MediaWiki description page. The LilyPond project also offers a variety of useful documentation, including an FAQ that explains how to use a keyboard or one of several score-based editors to create LilyPond markup that can be imported into Wikipedia articles.

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