Lilypond Swing Feeling

Question

How to properly write sheet music in swing-feeling with lilypond?

Just for clarification: in MuseScore, this can be achieved as explained here.

I'm a bit confused as I did not find anything useful in the internet. I cannot simply write the hint as text annottaion since I'd like to convert the music to midi using lilysong, of course as swing.

The lilypond-documentation implicitly says that my goal is achievable:

Unsupported in MIDI

The following items of notation have no effect on the MIDI output, unless you use The Articulate script:

• Rhythms entered as annotations, e.g. swing
• [...]

I'm willing to use the Articulate script. The documentation does, however, not mention how to enter this swing rhythm annotation.

Answer 1

The documentation doesn't mention it because the comments in the script itself (in subdirectory LilyPond\usr\share\lilypond\current\ly\articulate.ly in my installation) say that swing, and several other playback features, are not implemented yet.

Actually, it's hard to implement swing "correctly" unless the basic rhythm of the music is very simple. If the notated rhythm divides the beats into parts that are smaller than half beats, applying a simple algorithm to adjust the rhythm usually gives the wrong result.

Answer 2

As of Lilypond 2.21.82 (probably in 2.20 too), there exists a special swing script. It provides a \tripletfeel command can be used in the following manner (for 8th notes, which is the most common way, hence the 8 as an argument):

\score {
  \tripletFeel 8 {
    % some music
  }
  \midi { }
}