Using Music Features for Managing Revisions and Variants in Music Notation Software

"Music engravers need to manage both revisions and variants of digital music artifacts created with music notation software. However, existing version control systems such as Git fail to manage fine-grained revisions and variants in a uniform manner. This paper presents an approach that uses music features and applies a variation control system in the domain of music notation. In particular, we extended the variation control system ECCO to support the evolution of digital music artifacts encoded in LilyPond. We illustrate music features using a running example. We present basic feature-oriented workflows and discuss the architecture and implementation of our LilyECCO tool. We further present a preliminary evaluation based on an existing LilyPond music artifact.