Re: Proposed CG agenda changes

Thanks, first, to all contributors and the thoughtful mails.

Michael:
Do I really understand right, that the new established
w3c-process implies, that we do not have to consider
interests of "existing customers and their investments"
(which in the past often was a stopper to sensful proposals).
This would be great news and open the possibility of
substantial improvements and fixes, of which some have
been mentioned by Peter Deutsch. Great.

From my perspective, I would second two of Peters proposals:

1) The voice must be a structure with a strongly defined
meaning and application.
As of now it has no limits in its application, it could
be some loose editorial annotation. Or a structure making
alement.
Obviously implementors used it according to what a voice
is in their programs. But this was not mandatory.
In fact, you are free to present the notes of a bar
in a messy zig-zag of time and voice, using backup
and forward elements.
I never saw a benefit in that freedom. In the last
consequence it urges the consumer to write an
compicated analyzer for an unordered sequence of events.

In my opinion, the voice is a building block of music.
It is a contiguous sequence of events, notes or rests.
And it should be used in a very strict way.

- a voice starts at bar time 0
- a voice can only go forward
- a voice may have gaps (invisible rests)
- starting another voice implies going back
  to bar time 0 (full backup).
All this of cours on a per measure base.

Things like the raindrop-prelude-example can be expressed
in this way.


2) There is a need for a chord-element as a container for notes.
Peter presented reasons for this, which needn't be repeated.
Nad I can't imagine a program, which wouldn't reflect this
structure in its own data model.


A last word regarding contemporary music and its notation:
A standard without adoption (i.e. broad implementation) is
useless and therefore wasted time. So better ask the potential
implementors.
My answer for example would be: Simply coping with traditional
western music notation is a task of decades, a lifetime task.
From this experience and perspective, the idea of developing
a spec and implemtation for contemporary notations, is totally
crazy. Of course out of curiousity I once peeked into this domain.
My conclusion: the common denominator is, that modern composers
try to coin each ones personal language, both in terms of sound and
of graphical representation. This is a fundamental contradiction
to the idea of a common specification. Isn't it?

Regards
Christof

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2015 20:15:48 UTC