Re: Co-chair meeting minutes: October 11, 2022 [via Music Notation Community Group]

Dear music-notation group,

I am an open-source developer (as well as professional software 
developer and architect) and musician and just joined this group to get 
some exchange and help.

After contributing to open source music software like OpenSongTabletApp, 
I decided to implement a true open-source app for android tablet devices 
supporting musicians with full fledged scores and auto-scolling, midi 
playback and so forth. As a fan of simple markup languages like AsciiDoc 
and ChordPro, I stumbled over ABC and did some experiments. However, 
used to the simplicity of ChordPro I wanted use this as a starting point 
but extend it with concepts of ABC. So I created a format called 
MusicDoc and started forming an Open-Source project around it that can 
be found here:

https://musicdoc.github.io/

I already implemented a model for songs and their score with 
stave-systems, staves, clef, metre, voices, rests, notes, all kind of 
decorations, slurs, ties, bars and all the complex things that music has 
to offer. I can already read and write different formats like ABC, 
MusicDoc, OpenSong from/to that model. I also plan to support MusicXML 
as well as Midi what will also keep me busy many weekends in the future.

Currently I am working on rendering the model to graphics (music sheet). 
To make my code re-uasble I started creating a rendering engine that can 
do the complex layout computation as an abstract reusable renderer that 
I can then reuse for Android SDK graphics, JavaFx, or generation of PDF 
or SVG. While I am just starting with this and fortunately stumbled over 
SMuFL that I decided to use, I collected quite some questions that I 
want to ask here and hope to find some answers:

1. I searched the entire specification of SMuFL but could not find 
anything about a volta. IMHO this is quite a common construct in sheet 
music so I would love to know if I either missed something or if there 
is a reason that SMuFL does not specify anything for it (the volta 
"bracket" or the repeat numbers such as "1.-3., 5." written under that 
"bracket" - I am asking for the latter as there is a glyph for way more 
exotic stuff in in SMuFL - not only for every digit of the metre or a 
tuplet, including inversed notations but also Kahnotation or whatever 
exotic stuff I have never seen in my life and most probably will never 
use in my life as musician)?

2. Maybe I just scanned the SMuFL specification (but already know a lot 
about Unicode from my work) that is quite complex, but when I found 
things like combining characters to start and end beams or slurs my 
highest expecations came up: I thought that I could use this to delegate 
all the complex computation of rendering beam-groups and slurs to the 
typesetting system by just concatenating according glyphs and rendering 
text. However, when I tried this on Android or other technologies (I 
even used MS word), I never got any effect from these combining 
characters. What are these combining characters for? Can you actually 
use combining characters to raise or lower notes, connect flagged notes 
with beams by just putting beam start and beam end arround them, etc.?

3. Is there anybody interested in my concrete project? Could a simple 
text based music format also be of interest for W3C?

I would be happy about any feedback - even if just a partial answer to 
one of my questions or any link that might be helpful.

p.s.: Just in case anybody here is a Java developer and wants to have a 
look at my code - I am also happy about any kind of feedback.

Kind regards
   Jörg

Received on Monday, 7 November 2022 09:21:29 UTC