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

Roger, 
 
With all due respect to Doug, I think you've hit the nail on the head with
your observation that this is a web audio group, and not where you need to
be raising your concerns about notation accuracy. Notation accuracy is not
currently being affected by the web or client apps... so I don't think it's
something that should be solved in W3C (just my opinion). 
 
I don't know where to go to work on notation technologies and standards, but
the first place I would check out is Mr. Good's MusicXML 3.0 forum.
 
Tom White
MMA



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From: public-xg-audio-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-audio-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 2:25 PM
To: Michael Good; public-xg-audio@w3.org
Subject: 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/>