Re: HTML5 MusicXML

Hi Snake,

Since my company Noteflight provides web-based music notation (and is deeply involved with MusicXML), I thought it would make sense for me to chime in here.

As you said, MusicXML is all about representing notation. Notation has a much less direct mapping onto real-time performance than MIDI data. And although there are ways of embedding explicit real-time performance data into MusicXML, this feature is optional and in practice is not usually included in MusicXML documents.

So in general, once one gets past the obvious things about notation and into the many nuances, there are many possible ways to generate a musical performance from a given MusicXML document. Different applications are free to do this using quite different approaches and a lot of judgment calls come into play. It would be very challenging to standardize such a thing.

Consequently I think the most flexible and practical choice is to leave the interpretation of MusicXML in the hands of the developer community. Having the Web MIDI API and the Web Audio API together will allow MusicXML-aware applications and libraries to finally be implemented on top of web standards.

Best,

... .  .    .       Joe


Joe Berkovitz
President

Noteflight LLC
Boston, Mass.
phone: +1 978 314 6271
www.noteflight.com

On Sep 24, 2012, at 7:39 AM, Jussi Kalliokoski <jussi.kalliokoski@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello there!
> 
> While I like the idea of using MusicXML on the web, there is currently no technical restriction for doing that (in fact you even get an XML parser for free). The Web MIDI API seeks to solve the technical restriction of having access to external/internal MIDI devices available to the computer. The API doesn't, for example, allow playback of standard MIDI files out of the box, but it does enable you to send messages to MIDI devices so that user-side standard MIDI libraries can have an output target for the data they read.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jussi
> 
> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Snake <snake@defenderofrock.com> wrote:
> Hey Guys,
> 
> How about including MusicXML as MIDI has no information about notation.
> 
> 
>