Re: locus notation for spatial music

Thanks for this proposal, Douglas. It appears that these symbols are of Luís’s own invention and have not yet been included in any published works?

As such, that would normally disqualify them from inclusion in SMuFL until they have become at least somewhat established in their use.

If I’m misunderstanding and there is a corpus of scores that use these symbols, please let me know.

Daniel

From: Douglas Blumeyer <douglas.blumeyer@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, 27 February 2021 at 23:47
To: public-music-notation@w3.org <public-music-notation@w3.org>
Cc: Luís Zanforlin <music@luiszanforlin.com>
Subject: 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<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

Product Marketing Manager
Phone: +44 20 3696 1811

Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH
Beim Strohhause 31, 20097 Hamburg, Germany

President: Andreas Stelling | Managing Directors: Masahiro Ikeda, Jun Nishimura
Registration Court: Hamburg HR B 86 534 | VAT ID: DE118677139

Visit the Steinberg website<http://www.steinberg.net> or connect with us on Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/Steinberg>, Twitter<http://twitter.com/steinbergmedia>, Instagram<http://www.instagram.com/steinbergmedia> and SoundCloud<http://www.soundcloud.com/steinbergmedia>.
Watch our Cubase<https://www.youtube.com/cubase>, Dorico<https://www.youtube.com/dorico>, Mobile Apps<https://www.youtube.com/mobile_apps_steinberg>, Nuendo<https://www.youtube.com/nuendo>, Steinberg<https://www.youtube.com/user/SteinbergSoftware>, Audio Interfaces<https://www.youtube.com/audiointerfaces>, VST Instruments & Plug-Ins<https://www.youtube.com/VSTinstrumentsplugins> and WaveLab<https://www.youtube.com/WaveLab> videos on YouTube.