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

Yes, the statement about notation requiring audio made me very uncomfortable, too.

-----Original Message-----
From: public-xg-audio-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-audio-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Richard V Robinson
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 2:06 PM
To: public-xg-audio@w3.org
Subject: Re: Re: Music Notation on the Web - Last Call?

Dear The List,

I'm contributing on the thread mostly just to ensure I'm not deemed a
"lurker."  I have read through the subject thread with great interest,
but perhaps not always thorough understanding.  As a practicing
composer, instrumentalist, and erstwhile computer "scientist," and
having a long history of experience with notation software and other
tools that purport to computerize music making in some way, I could
not identify more with Roger's feeling that "something" needs to be
done.

I don't guess it's really the job of a Web standards group to "solve"
the problems of awkward user interactions, formatting limitations,
etc, etc, etc, that plague existing software packages.  It does seem
to me there should be an opportunity in the areas of requirements
definitions and interface specs.  I view the ontology arena with a bit
less optimism, mainly because it seems the core concepts and models
underlying commercial products, open source, and musicxml are really
diverse.

Divide-and-conquer is a time-honored and effective approach in our
disciplines.  That's probably the source of my discomfort with a
statement (to pick one from the thread, at random) such as "notation
directly without plug-ins using web standards requires the audio API."
 In my view, when notation capabilities end up entwined with audio,
the game has been lost.

I'd like to echo the sentiments of Kumar and others who touched on the
lack (in current commercial and open source packages) of support for
notations other than standard 19th Century European.  Cipher notation
for gamelan, traditional Chinese, and other musics is "easy," if
time-consuming, to transcribe from standard notation and vice versa.
This is precisely the sort of thing where one would like to think a
single underlying representation could fully support more than one
visualization format, yes?

Sorry about the terse and rather random arrangement of these thoughts.
 Hope I can look forward to working together with you all to tease out
the fundamental issues.  Roger:  don't "give up"!

--dick r


On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Michael Good <musicxml@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> C., thank you for the contact information regarding scala. We plan to
> investigate if MusicXML 3.0 can improve the support for temperaments and
> microtonal music beyond what is in MusicXML 2.0. The notation software world
> seems to be ready for this now in a way it wasn't before. We now have the
> mus2 notation software available for microtonal music, and the Ptolemaic
> program already doing MusicXML to scala conversions.
>
> Yves, MusicXML 2.0 does include linking between scores and other music
> information with the bookmark and link elements. These have not yet been
> supported much in software, though. It is difficult to move forward much
> further without software implementations guiding it, because of the high
> risk of doing things wrong in a vacuum. It is definitely something we could
> look to improve in MusicXML 3.0 if there is sufficient interest in the
> community.
>
> MusicXML 3.0 discussions will be held on the MusicXML mailing list
> (http://www.recordare.com/musicxml/mailing-list). If anyone here is going to
> NAMM next month, it would be great to meet in person there.
>
> Kumar, there are already many browser-based music notation programs, but
> they generally rely on notation-specific browser plug-ins or Flash. To do
> notation directly without plug-ins using web standards requires the audio
> API, plus better interactive graphics API implementations (on mobile
> browsers in particular).
>
> Best regards,
>
> Michael Good
> Recordare LLC
> www.recordare.com
>

Received on Wednesday, 15 December 2010 22:06:53 UTC