locus notation for spatial music

Hello my fellow MNCG folks,

At present, SMuFL lacks any way of notating spatial music. Luís
Zanforlin’s locus
notation <http://luiszanforlin.com/projects/project003/project_page.html>
is an excellent solution to the problem, and I’d like to get it included in
SMuFL.

It includes 26 glyphs which indicate head-relative source positions from a
top-down perspective. The spatial resolution is 45°; there are 8 glyphs
which indicate front, front right, right, back right, back, back left,
left, and front left. An additional 8 glyphs indicate these same directions
except more distantly positioned, and an additional 8 indicate them except
more closely positioned. Then one glyph indicates center position, and one
glyph indicates non-directional sound.

There are an additional 8 glyphs which indicate vertical source position:
distantly above, above, closely above, center, closely below, below,
distantly below, and vertically non-directional.

Then there are 5 glyphs which indicate motion. A dash glyph indicates
motion in general from one position to another. Then there are two curved
arrows which indicate clockwise or counterclockwise rotation while
maintaining the same radius. Vertically mirrored versions of these arrows
are also available for when the sound is in the back, which looks more
natural on the page.

I understand that SMuFL prefers to organize itself in chunks of 16 glyphs,
due to the hexadecimal nature of Unicode codepoints. Locus notation
contains a total of 26 + 8 + 1 + 4 = 39 glyphs, so it would need 3 sets of
16 codepoints for a total of 48 codepoints (leaving 9 leftover for later if
need arises).

I have worked with Luís (cc’d here) to prepare a list of glyphnames and
descriptions. Would there be anything else required?

The glyphs can be found in this font:
http://luiszanforlin.com//downloads/Locus-Regular_v1.0.ttf

Once codepoints are assigned, I can prepare a modified version of the
Bravura Font with the correct glyphs in the correct positions.

By the way, Luís and I are open to any feedback folks here may have on the
craft of the glyphs. Luís designed them himself, and we both think they
look acceptable. But neither he nor I are professional font designers, so
we’re concerned we may be missing opportunities to optimize the design,
whether for legibility or synergy with other symbol symbols (e.g. should
line thicknesses match staff line thickness, etc.)

Thanks in advance for your consideration,

Douglas