Blog: #musescore

A new experimental nerdy thing, for people who like hymns, sheet music, and textures:

How I make these hymn prints (as I’m calling them):

• Typeset the first phrase (or so) in MuseScore using the Bravura font, with the spacing trimmed to within an inch of its life
• Play it out loud to make sure I entered it right (cough) and export an SVG
• Drag the SVG into a frame in Figma and use the SkewDat plugin to skew it -4°, center it, then export a 4,000px-wide PNG
• Use ImageMagick to do some erosion and dilation (to simulate age and ink spread): convert input.png -morphology erode disk:18 -morphology dilate disk:16 output.png
• Texture the image in Affinity Photo and export the PNG
• Upscale with Real-ESRGAN to 12,000px-wide
• Downscale a little in Affinity Photo, add 8% monochrome noise, and export the final PNG

I’m still figuring out how I want to do these (full bleed or not, barlines, clefs and key signatures or not, etc.). Also thinking about possibly doing some abstract versions as well, to avoid all these music typesetting issues entirely.

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After a ten-year break, I’ve started writing music again. The new piece is called “One Quiet Night” and is a song about Christ that I wrote for a family Christmas party (I played piano, my wife played viola, and two of my wife’s siblings sang). At some point I’m hoping to record it, but until then, the sheet music will have to do. (It’s available in PDF, and the MusicXML is also available.)

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