Re: Semantics and Music Notation

Hi James,


> As I said at the recent face-to-face in Frankfurt, I don't think one can
> legislate on the meaning of a particular glyph. The simplest glyphs (for
> example the dot '.', plus '+', or zero '0') are particularly often
> overloaded to mean different things in different contexts: Dots are used
> for augmentation of durations, staccato, as noteheads etc. A plus glyph (+)
> can mean simple addition in a mathematical text, hand-stopping in horn
> parts, be part of a complex time-signature etc.
>

Within the confines of an accepted corpus of notation and performance
practice (e.g. the bulk of CWMN works), one absolutely *can* agree on the
meanings of a glyph -- in fact, such legislation is one of the advantages
of any notational system that has a substantial body of practitioners in
the world. Even overloaded glyphs can be understood in one way or another,
and these distinctions can be captured in an encoding ("+" in a time
signature is not encoded the same way as "+" as an articulation on a note).

I fear that this thread is headed down a meta-rabbit-hole of extreme
abstraction, in its effort to support open-ended definitions of any musical
language. There will then be a need for a musical meta-language as well
(for describing the structure and musical meaning of the arbitrary
language).

Such a meta-language is a very interesting problem, but if we take it on, I
do not envision this group making meaningful progress with respect to our
charter to develop a useful encoding for the very large body of existing
works. Perhaps a separate group would like to break off and develop such a
meta-notation-language as a separate effort. If successful -- a big if --
it could possibly serve as a separate document that supplies semantic
definitions for glyphs used in a score, supplementing the work done in this
group.

This stance doesn't mean we can't support graphical scores, or include
arbitrary, non-canonical glyphs and notations in scores. But I believe that
it's best *within our encoding system* to allow these to act as opaque,
literal glyphs for which there is no particular interpretation. In the
future a separate effort -- perhaps yours -- to describe arbitrary
notational systems may succeed in supplying those interpretations. In the
meantime, the real world of musical practice supplies a very effective set
of interpretations for widely accepted notation systems.

...Joe