For your consideration: an MNX thought exercise

Following the discussion over the last days I kept a steadily growing text
file with notes and questions. But with each new entry the prospect of
discussing all those points in detail over a mailing list got me more and
more frustrated, since this mode of communication is really not my forte.

 

So, I tried a different approach. Based on my understanding of Joe's
proposal I set out to encode as thoroughly as possible this medium-complex
example <http://notenlektorat.de/examp/MR7.jpg>  (the first page of the
seventh movement from Ligeti's Musica Ricercata), building on many
principles that Joe outlined, but at times also going off into a very
different direction – here is what I came up with
<http://notenlektorat.de/examp/An%20MNX%20thought%20exercise.pdf> . I should
say at this point that I do not present this here as a deliberate proposal,
but rather as a jumping off point for further discussion. The whole document
is still more on the pseudocode side of things, and there is of course the
fact that I am merely an autodidact coder, with a good chance that I have
cooked up something that does not make sense.

 

I hope that the document is self-explanatory in many ways. Since Frankfurt
is coming closer and closer, I decided to just get this out instead of
producing a version with some more in-depth commentary (something that I
will gladly provide in case it is requested, outweighing any
well-intentioned ridicule). Still, here are some select points of interest:

 

It will become obvious quickly that I am of the faction that would like to
see the measure to lose the fundamental structural importance that it is
endowed with in MusicXML. However, I would also like to stress that the
structure that I have come up with should be perfectly capable to have any
encoding of the sort presented here rearranged in an equivalent form that
comes close to the measure-centric approach – at least so I believe.
Furthermore, it should be possible to provide a generic algorithm for
converting one form into the other and vice versa (Full disclosure: this is
not much more than a conjecture at this point). It is my conviction that the
presented approach has distinct advantages, but it is in fact also my hope
that attempting to reach a high level of abstraction will actually allow for
safely encoding the same thing by way of different structural
encapsulations. The example at hand is written in a way that makes heavy use
of referencing; with mostly the same tools (other than those for
referencing) it should be possible to write the same content out concretely,
although I suspect that it would be much more complicated. Still, such an
equivalent form that emulates a measure-based structure might be preferable
for some applications.

 

One might also notice that barlines do not feature at all within the whole
thing. This is because barlines are considered implicitly provided elements
of the containers with type "measure", at least within the context of the
notationtype "CWSN". Implicit sub-elements are in fact central to the whole
system. Looking at my proposal for tied notes one might wonder why no actual
elements for ties do appear. However, those are assumed to be implicitly
included in the notated tie chain elements, and a parser would, presumably,
conjure them up from default settings when processing the file. Only if an
implied element does deviate from its default settings will it be explicitly
encoded. There are some such cases within the example, although not with
ties.

 

Lastly – the document uses an extensive colour scheme. I hope to expound the
principles behind this at a later point and to lobby for their inclusion,
but for now you might safely ignore it.

 

I will try to post a few more examples of smaller scale before Frankfurt. I
particularly hope to present next some twenty-seven bars from a Beethoven
string quartet (as an example of a much more conventional score), the
encoding of which focuses on a few aspects that are not prominent in the
Ligeti. I am aware though that today's example alone is quite a whopper to
be studied in some depth within the remaining time. So I will expect no one
to hold their breath for me posting even more. Still, I would be glad if I
have provided some new input to the overall discussion. The only thing that
saddens me is that there won't be enough time before the meeting any more to
attempt a complete manual pseudo-encoding of this
<http://notenlektorat.de/examp/P%C3%B6mmelchen.png> pièce de résistance.

 

Best,

 

Alex