Re: MNX Proposal now Available [via Music Notation Community Group]

Jeremy,

Joe decided, for the purposes of his first draft, to concentrate on 
CWMN, but he's asking for feedback. I'm not at all sure that he has 
finally decided to go for a strictly CWMN standard. Why else would he 
include the notion of Profiles? Its something we'll surely be discussing 
in Frankfurt.

I think that including Asian (and Arabic) notations in any future W3C 
standard will be much easier than you imagine, and that any future 
standard will be much more likely to be approved by the W3C if it can 
cope with as many of the world's writing systems as possible. The W3C 
has standards that apply to ordinary text that is written from right to 
left, so I imagine that it will expect us to follow suit.

Best,
James


Am 01.04.2017 um 15:14 schrieb Jeremy Sawruk:
> James,
> Just because something is in the use cases doesn't necessarily mean 
> that it is currently in scope. Joe has decided to just focus on CWMN 
> at the moment, as it covers a lot of use cases while narrowing scope 
> (though still a very wide scope!).
>
> You said: "I think there is going to have to be some mechanism in MNX 
> to specify the type of the notation being encoded." Yes, that is the 
> central idea of the score content type (Section 3.1). You are free to 
> discuss other content types, and I think the proposal is flexible 
> enough to describe medieval (neumes and mensural notations) and Asian 
> notation that is aligned vertically rather than horizontally. It is my 
> opinion that both can be achieved using the <sequence> and <event> 
> element, as discussed in Section 5.3.6.
>
> On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 5:47 AM, James Ingram <j.ingram@netcologne.de 
> <mailto:j.ingram@netcologne.de>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Rafael, Joe, all,
>
>     Rafael said (about his speciality, Okinawan notation):
>
>>     But I understand that this tiny and infrequent use case, as
>>     medieval music notation, will be out of the scope of your standard.
>     I think that both Asian notations and mediaeval European notations
>     should be in scope. They are in the use cases.
>
>     @Rafael: As I understand it, Okinawan notation reads from top to
>     bottom, with the columns being read from right to left. This is
>     essentially a simple rotation of 90 degrees from the way CMN is
>     read. In fact, depending on how MNX decides to organise its
>     container hierarchies, and whether or not you use measures, you
>     could consider each column to be a <measure>, <staff> or <system>.
>     I don't see any problem there.
>
>     I think there is going to have to be some mechanism in MNX to
>     specify the type of the notation being encoded. It would therefore
>     help the group to know more about the variability within Asian
>     notations. I'm going to open two new threads where we can talk
>     about that:
>     1. Asian notations: The directions in which they are read
>     2. Asian event symbols
>
>     @everyone: Please reply, if at all, to one of the above threads
>     (not this one).
>
>     All the best,
>     James
>
>
>     Am 31.03.2017 um 03:10 schrieb Rafael López García:
>>>
>>>         I bet that MNX stands for Music Notation XML, and then what
>>>         you want to save is the notation, not the music itself
>>>         (otherwise you would use an approach more similar to MIDI).
>>>
>>>     Not bad, and you didn't even have to read the spec!  :-)
>>     But I read the one of MusicXML. And I wrote a MusicXML parser and
>>     a Java-2-MusicXML converter in Android. And I may write another
>>     for MNX in the future.
>>>
>>>     Yes, this is about saving a score, which is instructions on how
>>>     to perform music, as distinct from music itself.
>>>
>>>         And in my experience as a programmer I also think that XML
>>>         is not a very good format to support "operations" (move a
>>>         note to another measure, etc.), only serialize and
>>>         de-serialize. I think the XML should be transformed to a
>>>         object structure in memory and the operations should be
>>>         performed to those objects, then saved again. And here you
>>>         can choose to save all the XML again or replace only the one
>>>         referred by the objects that have changed, but that is a
>>>         matter to decide by every software developer (for example,
>>>         my Kunkunshi Editor saves everything again as the XML parser
>>>         I use is very simple).
>>>
>>     From an informational point of view they are they are not
>>     completely the same. A human-readable music score is more than
>>     the instructions really needed to perform music. There are
>>     elements that are purely organizational (e.g.: the measures) and
>>     others that are merely aesthetic. You don't really need them to
>>     perform music, and they are actually introducing a certain
>>     complexity that could be avoided, that is why Dr. Hörnel argued
>>     the possibility of not having them.
>>
>>     And actually... that is my case. When I wrote the aforementioned
>>     MusicXML parser, I did it for Kunkunshi Editor, an editor of
>>     Okinawan music. Okinawan music is NOT represented in the western
>>     fashion with staves and measures, but with a different system
>>     called Kunkunshi (工工四). So I also found all those organizational
>>     and aesthetic elements completely unnecessary for my use case.
>>     And when I write the parser for MNX in the future, it will happen
>>     again. But I understand that this tiny and infrequent use case,
>>     as medieval music notation, will be out of the scope of your
>>     standard.
>>>     As you say, one shouldn't use XML itself to perform these
>>>     operations (and I hope no one does).
>>>
>>>     Standard modern practice is to parse XML into memory using a
>>>     Document Object Model (DOM) parser and manipulate the in-memory
>>>     structure via the DOM API -- a web standard, see
>>>     https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model
>>>     <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model>.
>>>     It can then be serialized back out.
>>>
>>>     This practice is so ubiquitous that web programmers like me will
>>>     talk in terms of manipulating the document, when what we really
>>>     mean is manipulating the DOM in memory!
>>>
>>>     ...Joe
>>     Yes I know what a DOM parser is, I am tired of programming them.
>>     But when I read Dr. Hörnel's email it looked like somebody was
>>     opening the door to directly perform operations there. I am glad
>>     you clarified that is not the case.
>>
>>     Best regards,
>>
>>     Rafa
>
>     -- 
>     https://github.com/notator
>     http://james-ingram-act-two.de
>
>

-- 
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