RE: Semantics and Music Notation

Joe, 

 

Yes, let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Except… 

 

Before going to the exceptions: I find it amusing if people want to have a standard cover a situation where “composers define the meaning of a symbol in the foreword to a score”. That’s as opposite to a standard as there can be. As I’ve stated before: there’s a standard for that, it’s called PDF. 

 

No to get to the “except…”. You can leave glyphs to be as what they are – glyphs. But then, PDF already covers that. I’d expect MusicXML to be beyond that and at least cover tried and tested CWMN practices. 

 

Which brings me back to semantics of annotations. MusicXML – or at least a “annotation profile” – should cover common, semantic annotations, and leave it to the renderer to display those, possibly to the liking of the individual musician. 

Just two examples:

·         Harp pedals: these are not even annotations, but form a part of the score, but nobody engraves them because harpists like to have them notated in ten-ish different ways. 

·         Fingerings: in SCORA we render those in the “classical” way – above staff, rather small – yet I hear musicans that want to have it larger, below staff when the notes are in the lower half, other font, … 

 

For me, it’s all about making scores customised to the user. MusicXML should be semantic enough (and the profiles should force the applications/engravers to use those semantics) to allow exactly that. 

 

Regards, 

 

JanR

 

 

 

 

 

 

From: Joe Berkovitz [mailto:joe@noteflight.com] 
Sent: woensdag 20 april 2016 23:08
To: James Ingram
Cc: public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org; Jim DeLaHunt
Subject: 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