Vocal music - GNU LilyPond
Description: GNU LilyPond

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### 7.3 Vocal music

Since LilyPond input files are text, there are two issues to consider when working with vocal music:

- Song texts must be entered as text, not notes. For example, the input `d` should be interpreted as a one letter syllable, not the note D.
- Song texts must be aligned with the notes of their melody.

There are a few different ways to define lyrics; the simplest way is to use the `\addlyrics` function.

##### Commonly tweaked properties

Checking to make sure that text scripts and lyrics are within the margins is a relatively large computational task. To speed up processing, lilypond does not perform such calculations by default; to enable it, use

    \override Score.PaperColumn #'keep-inside-line = ##t

To make lyrics avoid barlines as well, use

    \layout {
      \context {
        \Lyrics
          \consists "Bar_engraver"
          \consists "Separating_line_group_engraver"
          \override BarLine #'transparent = ##t
      }
    }

This page is for LilyPond-2.8.8 (stable-branch).

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