LED & LINTEL:
A WINDOWS Mini-Editor and Interpreter for LABANOTATION

Francis Edward Simon Hunt
George Politis
and
Don Herbison-Evans
( donherbisonevans@yahoo.com)

Technical Report 343

Basser Department of Computer Science
University of Sydney

(updated 7 October 2007)

ABSTRACT

A simple computer editor LED has been written for a subset of Labanotation, which is a human movement script widely taught and used around the world, for example:

  • Dance Notation Bureau, New York,
  • University of Frankfurt.

    The editor has been written with great attention being placed on the user-computer interface to make it particularly user-friendly. It is written in C++ for use under Windows on a PC. The basic operations are controlled by the mouse. The editor provides 109 basic symbols partitioned into 10 menus. Symbols on a score can be deleted, copied, or altered, and the score scrolled up or down. Scores can be created, stored, retrieved for further editing, and written out as PostScript files for printing.


    LED in operation,
    showing the start of the Barn Dance

    Additionally, a simple interpreter LINTEL has been written. LINTEL creates an interactive 3D animation of the score, as well as a NUDES animation script of the score. In this way, scores may checked for general correctness, and dancers with less experience in notation may see what a score "means". These programs are written in C++, and are still in the experimental stage, and still contain plenty of glitches.

    A number of mpg animations have also been made from the notation of the man's and lady's steps in the New Vogue dances using LINTEL and the NUDES suite, and can be seen in the directory: http://linus.it.uts.edu.au/~don/vogmovies

    The various source codes are available including:

  • led.cpp : Source code for LED in C++ for Windows;
  • led.c : Source code for LED in C for XWIndows;
  • lintel.cpp : Source code for LINTER;
  • shiftlbn.c : Program to shift a LED.lbn score up/down the page;
  • rasts.c : Image converter from simple PostScript format to PPM format;
  • showx.c : Display program for PPM format images on X-Windows;
  • drawelx.c : 3D interactive display program for Unix XWindows to display the animation of a NUDES.3 file.

    • Also available are:

  • executable code of LED
    which also needs:
  • OpenGL Libraries,
  • executable code for LINTEL which also needs OpenGL Libraries, as well as
  • LINTEL figures and movement subroutines,

    and optionally

  • NUDES simple male figure file,
  • NUDES simple female figure file,
  • NUDES complex male figure file, and
  • NUDES complex female figure file,

    • Examples of the scores produced by LED may be seen in the scores of the 23 competition and championship New Vogue dances approved by the Australian Dancesport Federation, (e.g. the Merrilyn), which were prepared using LED.

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