Re: MNX proposal §1.2

Hi James,

>> You are leaving out the main dish: it is semantic, and not spatial or temporal.
> I don't see how a computer file could include the main dish. The semantics are located in the readers' minds, and computers have no access to minds. Nobody really knowns how and why brains interpret the world in terms of space and time. Performance practice traditions are an exclusively human undertaking, and are what real music making is all about. 

I don’t think what you’ve written has been accurate since at least the 1950s if not earlier. Today computers and humans perform music together all the time. Computers have been representing musical semantics for a long time. There are hundreds of existing music applications that use MusicXML today to represent musical semantics in a way that can be shared with other applications. That includes applications that listen to human performers and communicate with them in semantic terms.

If you look at the list at http://www.musicxml.com/software/ <http://www.musicxml.com/software/> you will see a wide range of applications that are used for composing, performing, teaching, studying, preparing, analyzing, and finding music. The vast majority of these rely on a semantic representation of music. Many of the people behind those applications are members of this community group.

I think we need to understand and value the work of the different members of this group in order to have productive conversations. If we all think only of the needs of our particular application and not at all of the needs of other applications, it will be difficult to make any progress.

Best regards,

Michael Good
VP of MusicXML Technologies
MakeMusic, Inc.