Re: Co-chair meeting minutes: May 23, 2025 [via Music Notation Community Group]

Regarding the criteria for SMuFL inclusion, this seems like it could use some refinement. The criteria of a “composer” rather than a community of practice, (as many non-Western, non “work” oriented bodies of music are) is quite narrow. Why should a composer of a very small body of works have inherent privilege over a large, defined but anonymous body of work? (This criteria, for example, would exclude Latin plainchant).

Similarly, the notion of “publisher” is commercial in nature, and would seem to exclude quite a large body of music transmission media and methods, including manuscript materials. What definition of “published” are you using here? If a publishing company is holding the copyrights of a dead composer’s work and not allowing independent publication, does that fail the criteria?

Rather than defining rules about what shouldn’t be included, why not define a process for how something should be included? Right now the process seems to be to open up a GitHub issue and hope for the best [1]  More clarification on the rules and requirements, expected timelines, and perhaps a more open process of community feedback and peer review, might be a welcome improvement. As part of these rules the community member proposing the change would be responsible for doing some of the technical work and documentation as a requirement for inclusion, which might have the happy consequence of taking a bit of the workload off the editors.

-Andrew

PS: I have been reading these emails for a very long time, but have always wondered which of the editors were in attendance. Would it be possible to include a note in these minutes stating who of the editors (or any guests, if such a thing happens) was there for each meeting? 

[1] https://w3c.github.io/smufl/latest/about/missing-symbols.html

> On 23 May 2025, at 21:11, W3C Community Development Team <team-community-process@w3.org> wrote:
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> SMuFL
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> To start the meeting, we had a brief discussion about whether we could or should try to formalise the criteria for whether a set of symbols can be considered for inclusion in SMuFL, since we have had a number of recent proposals that have presented difficulties in assessing whether they are in sufficiently common use.
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> Myke proposed that we use the following criteria: a symbol can be encoded in SMuFL if it has been used in at least two works by different composers and published by different, independent publishers. We welcome community feedback on this proposal.
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> MNX
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> After we made the MNX example documents more accessible in the filesystem, @paulbayleaf found a couple of errors which he reported in #422 and #423, which Adrian has now fixed.
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> Adrian has added a means of encoding common time and cut common time signatures, which closes issue #94. He has also added an example document that exercises these changes.
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> Adrian has also brought the MNX converter up to date with a number of the most recent changes to MNX, including to ties, accidentals, slurs, and so on. There are still further things on Adrian's wish list that he plans to work on.
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> On the continuing topic of beams, Adrian has closed issues #299 and #399, leaving issue #419 open. (We spent the whole of our last meeting on 8 May discussing beams without arriving at any firm conclusions, which is why there were no minutes from that meeting.)
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> After a great deal of discussion, we believe we have hit upon a scheme for encoding beams that is both less verbose than the original proposal, but still completely explicit for every beam line. We will encode each visible beam line, specifying the first and last note in that beam (with the rule that grace notes encountered in the sequence are ignored). The beam object will itself be nestable, so beam lines after the primary beam will be encoded in a dictionary within the primary beam.
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> Adrian will write up our proposal and publish it in #419 for community feedback. The co-chairs all feel good about this proposal, and it has come after a great deal of consideration, so we hope it will meet with community approval!
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> Next meeting
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> The next co-chairs' meeting is scheduled for Thursday 5 June 2025.
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> ----------
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> This post sent on Music Notation Community Group
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> 'Co-chair meeting minutes: May 23, 2025'
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> https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/2025/05/23/co-chair-meeting-minutes-may-23-2025/
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> Learn more about the Music Notation Community Group:
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> https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation
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