Re: SVG and MIDI

Hi Helder,

Thanks for keeping this thread alive.

I'm an expert in music notation with a background in writing music scores.
Briefly: I was Karlheinz Stockhausen's copyist 1974-2000. Wrote his 
published scores in pen and ink until 1992, thereafter using a 
combination of Finale and Freehand. In the 1990s I wrote a group of 
plug-ins [1] for Freehand to help me create the complex scores I was 
being asked to create. I will be referring to their code when creating 
my SVG graphics.

Thanks for pointing me at the animation examples, but I'm not currently 
interested in animating the graphics. What interests me is real-time 
user interaction with fixed, printable scores.

In my first post, I said
> I need to include logical information about chord symbols, (such as their
> temporal duration and midi pitches) so that these do not have to be deduced
> from the (static 2D) graphics when I read and play the file.

I should have said _default_ duration not 'temporal duration'. The 
default duration can be overridden/ignored by any person or program 
playing the score. The default duration is related to the logical width 
of the symbol, and that's a value which is used to calculate the actual 
horizontal position of the symbols on the staff. The logical width can't 
be calculated from the graphics, because its only one of the inputs to 
the algorithm which justifies the symbols across the staff. But its a 
value which is known to the author of the graphics. :-)

I've already written an Assistant Performer [2] application which does 
the kind of user-interaction I have in mind. This currently reads scores 
in CapXML format [3], but when I've created some (extended) SVG it will 
be easy to make it read that too.

Currently I'm developing an Assistant Composer application which will 
_write_ (extended) SVG. (I'm also working on a long-overdue update of my 
website.) The Assistant Composer uses rather personal algorithms [4], 
but I could well imagine that _any_ music authoring program could write 
the extended SVG I have in mind. My Assistant Performer could play 
scores written by _any_ music authoring program if they exported my 
(extended) SVG.

If there's anyone out there working in this area, I'd be very interested 
in cooperating.

My mind has been exploding since Alex's post yesterday. Discovered that 
Inkpen preserves custom markup when reading and saving files... :-))

All the best,
James

[1] 
http://james-ingram-act-two.de/stockhausen/stockhausenSoftware.freeHandXtras.html
[2] http://james-ingram-act-two.de/moritz/moritzAssistantPerformer.html
[3] http://www.music-notation.info/de/formats/CapXML.html
[4] http://james-ingram-act-two.de/compositions/study2/aboutStudy2.html






-- 
www.james-ingram-act-two.de

Received on Saturday, 30 October 2010 11:20:43 UTC