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

I'm afraid that you are living in a totally different world than I am to
be able to say, "there seems to be little demand for graphics-only music
notation these days".    You know, the top five US orchestras (New York,
Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia) really have very
substantial budgets, not to mention the major symphonies in Europe,
Japan and so on.  There are quite a number of musicians, even these
days, who primarily use music that is graphically displayed, and there
are entire industries founded on these activities.  We're not talking
about a few cranks, we're talking about a major activity of humankind.
Not only that, but many people seem to think that education that
involves graphic musical formats is a really important part of our
school systems.

 

I think this may be the wrong forum to be talking about these things.  I
mean, this forum is called "audio", right?  So maybe it shouldn't be all
that surprising that most of the people in this group are primarily
interested in audio.  Actually, that would seem to be the right thing,
wouldn't it?  But perhaps it's not the right place to find people who
are interested in music that a person reads from a piece of paper or
other graphical display.  Can anyone suggest a better place?

 

From: public-xg-audio-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-xg-audio-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Michael Good
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 4:05 PM
To: public-xg-audio@w3.org
Subject: 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 <http://www.recordare.com/>