Re: The MusicXML challenge and Chords

Of course, everyone of us would love to support these kind of scores. The one problem I always have is that there is not one such thing as 20th or 21st century music notation – there are hundreds of them. It seems impossible to capture the _graphical appearance_ of all of these things with the same standard, unless we're willing to water the standard until it's hardly useful anymore. The whole point of a standard is that it standardizes things, and treats them according to a strictly defined set of rules. The whole point for some of these scores is to break such rules. Of course, this is a simplification on my end, and I know that this varies quite a lot, but I see no benefit in adding hundreds, if not thousands of unique special cases to a standard.

But, and here comes Andrew's mention of musical domains into play, it might be possible to capture the logical meaning of those 20th and 21st century scores under the hood of a commonly useful standard which still deserves this name. But this, in my opinion, is only possible by ignoring the graphical appearance of the score. I doubt that this is what you had in mind.

However, the situation is not too different from classical music, which is by far less standardized than a quick look at some 19th century prints seems to indicate. I'm working in a research project that seeks to trace Beethoven's compositional processes by closely analyzing small excerpts of his manuscripts. As his sketches are frequently incomplete in various ways (surprise, surprise), we need to separate the logical meaning from the graphical appearance, even for such simple things as two filled noteheads with an attached stem. They could be quarters, they could be 8th notes with a missing beam, they could be a tuplet with the middle note missing, etc. What we do is we describe the logical content (or what we believe it to be…) using MEI, and we connect every single item to an SVG shape on the page, indicating how it was written by Beethoven. To make a long story short, we're using two different standards – one for the music, and one for it's graphical rendition. Both are closely connected, and both can concentrate on what they're good at…




Am 26.10.2015 um 17:50 schrieb Dennis Bathory-Kitsz <bathory@maltedmedia.com>:

> On Mon, October 26, 2015 12:37 pm, Sienna Wood wrote:
>> If content and layout are fused in certain kinds of music, are the needs of
>> these styles/genres better met with graphics programs than with notation
>> programs?
> 
> No. They are musical scores. Notation programs have already been ignoring more
> than half a century of musical developments. It would be distressing to
> imagine that approach being continued here into the 21st century.
> 
> A few examples...
> 
> Crumb:
> <http://40.media.tumblr.com/b755cf8cd1e90e2151100589c8400850/tumblr_n7g4f8trhG1qbdqqlo1_1280.jpg>
> Stockhausen:
> <http://image.slidesharecdn.com/2010vicstockhausenmsa10-130913103902-phpapp01/95/increasing-the-mobility-of-stockhausens-mobile-scores-2010-lindsay-vickery-29-638.jpg?cb=1379068927>
> Bil Smith:
> <http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Xuc7pPkE3ZI/VKxeb8Pm47I/AAAAAAAAFjw/H_qr7SkYhkM/s1600/Venerate%2BSub%2B4.png>
> Kristina Wolfe:
> <http://www.kristinawolfemusic.com/Kristina_Wolfe/Projects/Entries/2013/11/5_Travels_through_the_east_files/Via%20Crucis.jpg>
> Me (substrate of a 3D score):
> <https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/t31.0-8/11218571_10155454247555234_5658955241456708996_o.jpg>
> 
> 
> 
> 
>