Re: Re: Music Notation on the Web - Last Call?

Hi Dick,

Thank you for your interesting thoughts on these issues.

 Could you please elaborate on why you feel that "when notation capabilities
end up entwined with audio, the game has been lost"? A large part of digital
music notation's appeal is the ability to hear it as well as see it.
Graphics-only formats and applications were popular in the early days of
computerized music notation, but these have been obsoleted in favor of
software that supports both display and playback. There is a lot of room for
these applications to improve, of course, but there seems to be little
demand for graphics-only music notation these days. I suspect I am
misunderstanding your point, or that I wasn't expressing myself clearly in
my earlier message that you quoted.

I'm not quite sure what you are asking for with your reference to
transcription between formats. If you want music from other cultures and
time periods transcribed into common Western music notation, MusicXML
2.0 should be handle much of this already. We are considering some
improvements to MusicXML 3.0 in this area, possibly including more direct
support for Chinese number notation along with improved microtonal features.
Note that MusicXML's scope is common Western music notation from the 17th
century onward, so its coverage is already quite a bit broader than 19th
century European.

Empirical evidence and music perception theory both suggest that trying to
represent all musics of all time periods in a single representation format
is unwise. The reasons why are discussed in my XML 2006 paper, and I have
seen no evidence or theory emerge in the past 4 years to argue otherwise:

  http://www.recordare.com/musicxml/xml-2006/limit-scope-carefully

Please note that MusicXML already serves as a format where a single
underlying representation can have many visualizations (or sonifications).
Several translators to Braille and one to talking music are under
development, along with visualization programs like music21 and Ptolemaic.

Best regards,

Michael Good
Recordare LLC
www.recordare.com