Re: locus notation for spatial music

I finally took the time today to explore Locus notation.

The concept is very intriguing.

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Personally, I am quite bullish on spatial audio and believe it will become an important part of the future of music composition software.

That said, if the target performance of the work is virtual (non-human performance of the score) I am not sure that marking this in notation is necessary.

There is, however, a significant use case for spatial notation that could be widely adopted though it is somewhat different than the described intent.

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Marching Band.

This notation can solve the challenge of describing changes in performer facing or instrument positioning relative to individual parts and specific points in the score.

If endorsed and supported by popular composers/arrangers for the genre, I could see a quick adoption of spatial notation.

Maybe if endorsed by an association or consortia of publishers/composers/arrangers, then it may been the criteria for SMuFL inclusion that Daniel Spreadbury described?

Daniel Ray

Musescore // Head of Strategy & Partnerships / +1.917.256.9258 / www.musescore.com
On Feb 28, 2021, 5:15 PM +0300, Daniel Spreadbury <D.Spreadbury@steinberg.de>, wrote:
> 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 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
> Product Marketing Manager
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