Typesetting music with mup after a 20-year hiatus

Back around 1999-2002, I was composing and performing music pretty regularly as a stress-relief from graduate studies. This got me looking into creating printer-friendly versions of a few of my songs. I came across mup—a tool that takes plain text sheet music descriptions and creates snazzy postscript output. Mup supported Linux, where I was doing all of my serious work, and it allowed for a LaTeX-style separation of document content from document format. It was not free software, but I was happy to pay for a license to this excellent tool.

Fast-forward to today, when I was struck by the desire to typeset "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" for my kids. I introduced them to this song via the classic video some time in November, and of course they loved it. I picked out the chords on the piano, and it's become a fun song for me to sit at the piano and sing with them. Three of my boys are taking piano lessons, and so I thought it might be fun for them to see it written out. It's much more syncopated than what they are playing in their lessons, but I thought the oldest in particular might enjoy the rhythmic challenge.

I did a little Googling and found what appeared to be viable options, but I stopped when I saw that mup is still around. Not only that: the authors made it free software back in 2012! Right on, gentlemen!

It was fun to re-learn mup's syntax after twenty years or so. Here's a quick example from the bridge:

1: 4c#;;;8;8~;
rom chord above 1: 1 "A";
lyrics 1: "Why they changed it, I_";
bar

1: 8c;8~;8;8~;2;
lyrics 1: "can't say.";
bar

The lines starting with "1:" are specifying the notes to go on the first staff—in my case, the first and only one. The "4c#;" means quarter note C#, and each empty semicolon after means to repeat that note. The "8" switches to an eighth note without changing the pitch, and the tilde is a tie to the next measure. The "rom chord above" is placing a chord above the staff at that location. The real killer feature, in my opinion, is the typesetting of the lyrics: the lyrics are automatically bound to the rhythm of the line.

The resulting typeset music looks like this:

I've put my whole arrangement up as a gist on GitHub in case you want to see all the source, and I've put the resulting PDF online as well.

Thanks to John and Bill at Arkkra Enterprises for this amazing piece of software. On the project's main page, they introduce themselves as "musicians and computer programmers," and mup is a great example of how computational thinking can lead to productive tools. It's a shade of the same point I made in my reflection about my November game design project, and it echoes my recent frustrations at work with having to use Box, Microsoft Word, and emailing files around for collaboration when LaTeX and GitHub would have been the perfect tools. In any case, if you're a programmer and a musician, make sure you at least take a look at mup.