Justification of printed music

Abstract

There is increasing interest in the use of computer systems for editing and printing sheet music [3, 19]. Music processing lags far behind text processing because of the complexities of music notation. Most music published today is still laid out by hand; while computers may be used, decisions about music-symbol placement are made by people. Much research remains to be done into computational methods of encoding the myriad rules of music notation. Individual rules are not difficult to formulate; it is the complex interaction among rules which is difficult to describe and control. In this article we focus on one aspect of music notation: the horizontal spacing of music to produce a right- and left- justified result.