Composing Music: The Modern Way

This morning as I dashed into Starbucks for my "grande bold, no room", I spied a Mac user with my Mac of choice: the BlackBook. I couldn't resist commenting how much I enjoyed that particular Mac and I noticed music notation on the screen. Being an amateur hack musician, I was very curious about what he was doing on his Mac. Turns out he's a composer and he was working on a new score. He demonstrated an open source notation program called Lilypond that interprets a text file to create a complex music score. Apparently, Trevor was involved in programming as well as music composition. Not only did I enjoy the impromptu demo of the software, I thoroughly enjoyed getting a glimpse of how modern composers are embracing technology to further their craft. It was cool to see Trevor every bit as excited about computers and iPhones as me but for totally different reasons. Check out the Lilypad project if this sounds like your sort of thing.