Sunday, March 27, 2022

Big screen lyrics

Providing slides with the lyrics to hymns is good for getting people to sing with their heads up, and you needn't haul hymnals in and out when you rearrange the seats. But sometimes it would help to have the music to go with the lyrics, especially when introducing a new song. I've tried to figure a readable way to add that as an option, but it needs more time and tinkering that I've devoted to the problem.

Managing the number of lines on the screen is a minor but pesky nuisance--sometimes the ratio of characters to syllables in a line is large enough to demand wrap-around. You want to break at at a vocal pause so it looks natural. Not a big problem--in English. I'd hate to try that in German.

Do German singers ever have to pause for breath in the middle of a word? Messiah seems to demand that in some places--or at any rate I don't have the lung capacity to hold out long enough. And there's the extended gloria in Angels We Have Heard On High. But it doesn't happen often. We generally don't overfeed English words.

6 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Let me make the music problem worse for you. I can pick up the melody line instantly, so no problem. But when I want the music it's because I want the bass harmony.

Douglas2 said...

I'm wondering if words in adequately large font above, with a single stave of melody for that line over the words in a font just small enough to fit the words in the right spot under the notes at the bottom of the screen, might be good.

I was just talking to a music-theory professor yesterday who said that in spite of his students having access to expensive score-writing programs Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico, he finds that nearly all of the students prefer the free muse-score program. So making the line of music-score itself is pretty easy and fast with free tools nowadays.

james said...

@avi: Yes, in the chapel we frequently hear 3 parts sung.

We use ProPresenter, which integrates the various features we want. I gather that there are add-ons that let you plot the chords, but they don't seem to match the word positions well. If I have to divide a line, I want the notes to follow the words, which implies some binding between the two components--and sometimes we change the words, so editing becomes more complicated than simply typing/deleting. I should look at muse-score to see how that might work--thanks for the suggestion.

james said...

The missing piece seems to be integrating something like musicXML into ProPresenter. The format supports lyrics (see https://www.w3.org/2021/06/musicxml40/musicxml-reference/elements/lyric/

There are tools (e.g. ScanScore) that could be used to load the music and the words automatically: see https://scan-score.com/en/faq/#tab-con-21. ScanScore doesn't allow complex editing, which this might require.

Some manual tweaking will be required--ocr isn't perfect.

I'll ping ProPresenter about their plans, but I'm not holding my breath. The layout options would be more complicated than their existing system, which resembles PowerPoint/Impress. An element seems to be a character, with the usual properties. An element in the lyric+score system would be a set of characters representing the word or part of a word to be sung, and the associated stave(s) and notes--both of which would have their own properties and alignments; which would have to be synchronized.
Also: how well do staves and notes show up on black background? I assume one could show the staves and key signatures fainter than the notes.
You fit fewer lines/screen--with both clefs I think you might only get one.

james said...

If it's in their plans, they aren't hinting about it to customers yet.

Roy Lofquist said...

Maybe the longest one syllable word in a song:

https://youtu.be/HjsM3puKPrs?t=84