3.11.4 Ambitus

The term ambitus denotes a range of pitches for a given voice in a part of music. It also may denote the pitch range that a musical instrument is capable of playing. Ambituses are printed on vocal parts, so singers can easily determine if it meets his or her capabilities.

It denoted at the beginning of a piece near the initial clef. The range is graphically specified by two note heads, that represent the minimum and maximum pitch. To print such ambituses, add the Ambitus_engraver (lilypond-internals) to the Voice (lilypond-internals) context, for example,

       \paper {
         \context {
           \VoiceContext
           \consists Ambitus_engraver
         }
       }

This results in the following output

If you have multiple voices in a single staff, and you want a single ambitus per staff rather than per each voice, add the Ambitus_engraver (lilypond-internals) to the Staff (lilypond-internals) context rather than to the Voice (lilypond-internals) context.

It is possible to tune individual ambituses for multiple voices on a single staff, for example by erasing or shifting them horizontally. An example is in input/test/ambitus-mixed.ly.

See also

Program reference: Ambitus (lilypond-internals).

Examples: input/regression/ambitus.ly, input/test/ambitus-mixed.ly.

Bugs

There is no collision handling in the case of multiple per-voice ambitus.

This page is for LilyPond-2.2.6 (stable-branch). Report errors to <bug-lilypond@gnu.org>.