Re: For your consideration: an MNX thought exercise

Quick (I promise!) followup to Jan and Alex.

First, let me just reaffirm before the discussion blows up again: I am
committed to working on a generalized approach to notation in parallel with
CWMN (but at a more stately pace). I do not think the two approaches can
serve the same interests, but I think they are both worthwhile. Far more
work needs to take place on defining the meaning of "generalized" than most
have acknowledged so far.

Alex, on a first reading I missed that you included the Pömmelchen score in
your email. Of course, you and I have discussed this score before. I think
it is a perfect test case for "generalized notation", precisely because of
its caprice and its ambiguity. I have affection for it as a composition,
and it raises some lovely questions precisely for the reasons that Jan
gave. I look forward to coming back and working with it again.

I must offer my opinion that I do not think it's going to be worthwhile to
torture a CWMN-specific dialect like MNX into representing
Pömmelchen's multiple and conflicting interpretations. Rather, I think it's
going to be an excellent test case for generalized notation. Pieces like
this I would class as "CWMN-inspired", but they are not CWMN. The Ligeti
actually, is much closer to CWMN and using "extreme interrogation
techniques" on MNX is perhaps not necessary.

.            .       .    .  . ...Joe

Joe Berkovitz
Founder
Noteflight LLC

49R Day Street
Somerville MA 02144
USA

"Bring music to life"
www.noteflight.com

On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 10:35 AM, Jan Rosseel <jan@scora.net> wrote:

> Dear Alex,
>
>
>
> Nice examples you give, and they do prove a point. But it’s a different
> one than you intend to make, I’m afraid. And it is at the core
> “philosophical” problem we’re having in this discussion. The discussion
> about having a measure object or not is not the core. The core is about the
> scope of a standard being written.
>
>
>
> In my view, your examples actually prove that such examples should not be
> taken into account when writing/discussing a standard.
>
>
>
> The Pömmelchen example should be clear by itself. It’s a drawing. It’s a
> nice find, but the graphical meaning is more important than the musical
> one. It’s actually very hard to read, and leaves room open for
> interpretation/error. What happens when the right hand “track” joins the
> left hand? Do we continue in treble clef, or start playing bass-clef with
> the right hand? The end also seems ambiguous to me. So as it is written,
> without explanation, it’s not playable as it has no **standard**
> interpretation even at this moment. So let’s not take it into account for a
> new standard.
>
>
>
> The “medium-level” example even more proves the point that this does not
> belong in a standards discussion. The piece does not follow normal music
> conventions in notation as we have them now. It really is two pieces that
> have no relation (and that could/should be written completely separately)
> that are forced onto each other. This is made 100% clear by the
> instructions in footnotes that show how to interpret things written down.
>
> Now, I would consider standard notation to already be more flexible than
> what realistically can be covered in a computer standard/program which
> typically is narrower than “real-life”. So if it doesn’t already fit a more
> flexible “standard”,  there’s no use trying to fit it into a standard that
> is more ridged in nature. Square peg and round hole comes to mind here.
>
>
>
> But the problem is really more fundamental. One could say that the actual
> intent of the composers of these two examples was to not follow standard
> conventions. They are people that like to experiment, and color outside of
> the existing lines. Stockhausen and Satie were mentioned, and those also
> fit this description.
>
>
>
> You will always have this tension between the norm(al) and border. It
> cannot be avoided. You can make a standard as wide and flexible as you
> want, you will find people that will not follow it. So the goal as
> described here by some to have a standard that has the potential to cover
> “everything” is a mirage.
>
>
>
> I’m all in favor of having a quite narrow scope. It gives focus. It’s
> easier to implement, and therefore has a larger chance of actually being
> used by enough programs so it achieves its goal of fostering
> interoperability.
>
> A too wide scope typically will either fail to define all elements with
> sufficient detail to avoid ambiguity, or it will be so large that no one
> will actually implement it.
>
>
>
> Now, Joe is trying to have his cake and eat it too by defining a wide
> scope in general, but using profiles to narrow down the standard to a
> workable subset. I’m fine with that. As long as we define the CWMN profile
> ASAP, and make it into something useful that is usable by a lot of
> programs.
>
>
>
> CWMN probably covers >95% of the market at this moment (*). So it really
> is a very sensible thing to do to limit us to that as a starting point.
>
>
>
> (*) It’s probably more like >99%. Let’s walk around in Hall 8 (publishers)
> at the Messe, and do a sample of what’s on display. For those that say we
> should also do that in Asia to get another perspective, well, I’ve done it
> at the Music Fair in Shanghai latest November. Lots of really different
> instruments, but all sheet music on display was CWMN.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> JanR
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* notenlektorat [mailto:post@notenlektorat.de]
> *Sent:* dinsdag 4 april 2017 0:44
> *To:* public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org
> *Subject:* 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 *pièce de résistance*
> <http://notenlektorat.de/examp/P%C3%B6mmelchen.png>.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
>
>
> Alex
>
>
>