Org Mode ❤ Music: Note taking with Music Notation at Ease

I’ve always been amazed by the extensibility of Emacs and Org mode.

To ones who might not be familiar with them: Org Mode is a truly extensible and powerful plain text writing system while Emacs being its supporting environment.

Babel is one of the most powerful features that Org Mode provides, which allows running almost arbitrary code inside Org Mode.

In this post, I’ll show how easy it is to write/view/export musical notations within Org Mode.

To the best of my knowledge, Org Mode is the only solution to write digital notes with music notation support (LaTeX, from a purely typesetting system perspective, also support this feature).

Lilypond

“Lilypond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts.”

We’ll leverage the Lilypond system within Org Mode to support music notation feature.

Installation

Check how to install Lilypond on your system on the website: LilyPond: Download

Enjoy

Then you are done!

When you want to insert a block of music notation, just begin a lilypond source code block.

An example is shown here :)

 1#+begin_src lilypond :file build/eg.png
 2\header{ tagline="" }
 3\relative c' {
 4  f e d c
 5  b a g a
 6  b c d e
 7  f g f e
 8  d c b a
 9  g1
10}
11#+end_src

What you see in Org Mode:

What you see when exporting to ox-hugo (or almost any other format):