How to change the symbol of time signature in Lilypond

Question

Instead of the big C or numerical time signature, I must use the symbol "サ". This time signature "サ" is common in many Chinese music pieces, it means "freely". How do I achieve this with Lilypond? Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Lilypond has the great ability to make anything look like anything. Really, any object has a property stencil, which tells Lilypond how the object should be rendered, and it can be overridden by whatever you want. If you override it with #ly:text-interface::print, you can then specify any markup in a property called text.

In your case, I would use any time signature (doesn't matter which one since it is being replaced with the character), override its stencil and immediately switch to a cadenza mode, like this:

\once\override Staff.TimeSignature.stencil = #ly:text-interface::print
\once\override Staff.TimeSignature.text = \markup{\fontsize #8 "サ" }
\once\override Staff.TimeSignature.extra-offset = #'(0 . -2)
\time 4/4
\cadenzaOn

% Your music goes here.

Edit: Apparently you can drop the \time 4/4 and it will still work okay. Thanks to @timbo.

I needed to make the Chinese character a lot bigger with \fontsize, and then shift it vertically by setting the extra-offset property, so that it is nicely centered. By the way, the cadenza mode is a bit of pain to use: each barline must be given with \bar "|", linebreaks can occur only at "invisible bars" made with \bar "", accidentals are remembered forever and the beaming is switched off, so you must specify all the beams manually with [ and ].

Then you could get something like this:

Here is a lilybin for you (it's a web app where you can write Lilypond snippets and they are compiled into PDF which is immediately rendered). However, they apparently don't have proper Chinese fonts installed, so I had to use the letter "A" instead.

Answer 2

You can make the time signature transparent with \override Staff.TimeSignature.transparent = ##t

e.g.

\version "2.20"

\header {
  title =   "Transparent Key Signature"
}

righthand =  {
  \key c \major
  \override Staff.TimeSignature.transparent = ##t
  \clef "treble"
  \relative c'' {
  c2-1 d e1 f2 e d r \bar "|."
  }
}

\score {
    \context Staff = "one" <<
      \righthand
    >>
  \layout { }
}

However the time signature is a pretty important aspect that will dictate how bars are structured (and defaults to 4/4 as still seen in the example)

You probably want to read the section on Unmetered music sometimes also referred to as free time

As for adding the character サ, that looks like the Japanese katakana 'sa' rather than a Chinese character. And サ is phonetic, it has no inherent meaning. You may want to doublecheck your source.

Defering to ramillies answer as he's listing better overrides