Shipping Containers is an experimental art album exploring copyright in the guise of filk hymns.
(Or it is a songbook that does this, and there's also a demo of the tracks available. It depends upon your perspective.)
The premise is a lonely space traveler thinks about what might be in store for the colony ship when they get there, but due to copyright restrictions only music made before 1923 is available on-board. So, he combines the two.
Filk music is frequently composed of songs about a particular fandom set to established music. In this case, each song is about a particular science fiction or fantasy fandom. (With one song combining two different space-related fandoms.) The tunes of these songs are explicitly public domain hymns. Most of these songs use a single hymn tune per song, but a few combine multiple hymn tunes in to a more modern structure containing chorus, verse, and bridge components.
The Creative Commons Attribution license means you can use this material as you like, including covering the entire album and selling the results to benefit your school. While some of the songs had arrangements tweaked slightly to better fit the lyrics, they are all traditional hymn tunes, and this means it should be possible to listen to other interpretations of the tunes to get ideas for what you can do with this sort of thing.
We want to help you use our music. While it may use traditional tunes, the lyrics may well be interesting enough for even modern young people.
This book was written using Lilypond, and the source files are organized to make it easy to extend and modify. For instance, while this book includes a single vocal staff and a standard piano staff, for recording we used fakebooks with just the vocals so we could easily see the melody and lyrics without the visual clutter of piano staffs.
What sort of specialized format would be most beneficial to you? SATB with two staffs and the lyrics in the middle? Separate books for soprano, alto, tenor and bass? Shifting a voice to another pitch? This is easy to do, we simply need to know what you need.
https://github.com/mrbeany/shipping-containers
The only tool we use for building is "lilypond" and the music is pulled in via include statements. This makes building trivial for any environment.
- Lilypond 2.18.2 or newer http://lilypond.org/
- Go to this directory, whereever it is located.
- Type: cd book
- Type: lilypond BookType
BookType can be one of:
- ShippingContainersFakebook.ly
- ShippingContainersHymnStyle.ly
- ShippingContainersMidis.ly
- ShippingContainersSongbook-A4.ly
- ShippingContainersSongbook.ly
The differences between the songbooks:
- ShippingContainersFakebook
The "Fakebook" just has the sung parts. These try to all fit on a single page when possible, and this is possible a lot more often when we just care about a single staff.
Ambitus is enabled.
- ShippingContainersHymnStyle
"Hymn Style" is designed for SATB singing. The lyrics are between the tenor and bass staffs, and each staff has an up-stem and a down-stem voice.
We can add ambitus to the staffs, but it is not currently enabled.
- ShippingContainersMidis
The "Midis" version doesn't build a songbook at all. It builds MIDI files.
There are two versions of all the songs, with names that should clearly indicate which songs are which.
One version has a basename suffix of "-withParts", and this version has the following MIDI tracks:
- tenor staff, both voices
- bass staff, both voices
- metronome, drums following time
- for vocals, which is the same notes that will be sung
The version without this suffix, just has the two piano staffs.
- ShippingContainersSongbook
The "Songbook" version is the version distributed with the album on Bandcamp.
This version is in US Letter format, with ambitus for the vocal part.
- ShippingContainersSongbook-A4
This is exactly the same as the "Songbook" version, except formatted for the international standard A4 paper instead of US-Letter.
Since the international sizes make sense, you can use this version for any of the A sizes and it will scale cleanly without unexpected whitespace.
This is known and easily resolved. If there's a request for it, it can be added.
It was omitted because only the primary "songbook" format was considered a priority for the release date.
Ambitus for a single-voice on a staff is trivial to add. Ambitus for multiple voices on a staff requires some manual placement.
At least in the US, when people think of the slightly oversized music songbooks, they're thinking nine inches across and twelve inches tall. The big-name publishing companies, like "Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation" in the US, use this size.
Lilypond knows this by the "arch a" name, and it would be as easy to configure as the "a4" version. (We would probably want to tweak staff breaks for the larger width, but this is done easily.)
The reason we don't have this format is two-fold: first, other than calling it "9x12" it isn't clear what to call it that people would immediately know, and secondly there don't appear to be places where you can easily get this size printed, so the value is suspect. I could deal with the "9x12" name, but if people can't print it on their home printers or even from a dedicated online print-shop there's little reason to make it available.
The song tunes are considered re-usable components that share a common "tunes" directory.
All includes reference the parent directory first. This is because they're relative to the starting location and not relative to the destination's location. Basically, a book references songs which references a tune and words. The include statements in the song need to work from the book's directory when building the book, but from the song's directory when testing.
Fermata is an issue. The tunes have variants (inside the primary file) for dealing with the issue in different ways. The solution for MIDI is normally to use "autotie" with the fermata replaced with the longer note, however the metronome voice needs to be correct in this case, so you can't always just repeat the same measure. However, I've yet to find a way to push fermata to the bottom programatically, so even the non-MIDI use of fermata has variants for the different ways it needs to be rendered.
Composite songs add additional problems with reusing music. There's additional variants to help with this.
Eventually, we'd like to not have any variants and just use functions to tweak the music. That's done in part with "filtermusic", which can strip fermata so we don't get duplicates.
It should be noted that composite songs are the primary reason that each tune uses a unique prefix. This allows tunes to be mixed together within a song without jumping through any hoops. It has the side benefit of not supporting accidentally reuse. (A variable is either correct or undefined. It is never stale.)
There's separate concepts of "lyrics" and "words." Lyrics are synchronized to music, and words are not usually available for the first few verses and are marked-up text.
There are typically two to four verses with only synchronized lyrics. Two is preferred if there are more than four verses and an even number. Three is preferred if there are more than four verses and an odd number. Four is only used if there's exactly four verses.
All verses should have synchronized lyrics, as when there's questions about how something is sung it can be invaluable. This is particularly important when developing new verses.
The whole point of the separate files is to support re-use. When music can be used on radically different paper sizes, this has consequences for when line breaks can be inserted. (Seriously, the same music could be used to generate a very short but very wide image that's horizontally scrolled in the video... You can't do this if the music contains manual breaks.)
That said, we do still need to tweak line breaks to get the best experience.
We've previously mentioned that the book references songs which then reference the music and lyrics. The manual line breaks can be inserted at the "song" level. This maximizes the reuse of the music and lyrics, but does not overcomplicate the book.
Page size is only ever defined in the "book" files. The songs themselves should never reference the page size.
When songs reference the page size it can result in scaling to fit the book's page size. When this is a difference between A4 and US Letter it is minor. When one of these is sized for paper, and the other is a specialized PNG file this produces far less useful results.
Files which can be built independently have a ".ly" extension. For instance, the song files can be built on their own, so they have this extension, though they're included in books.
Files which will only function as an include in another file have a ".ily" extension. This extension was picked because it is used by examples in the Lilypond documentation.