Musikmesse 2016 Meeting Minutes

The W3C Music Notation CG met in Genius/Logos (Hall 9.1) at Messe Frankfurt during the 2016 Musikmesse trade show, on Friday 8 April 2016 between 2.30pm and 4.30pm.

The meeting was chaired by CG co-chairs Joe Berkovitz, Michael Good, and Daniel Spreadbury, and was attended by about 40 members of the CG. A complete list of the attendees can be found at the end of this report, and the slides presented can be found here.

SMuFL 1.2 update

Daniel Spreadbury (Steinberg, CG co-chair) presented a brief summary of the state of the SMuFL 1.2 development effort, with 30 issues currently open and an expected delivery date of no later than the end of Q3 2016.

There were no substantive questions or discussion raised by this update.

MusicXML 3.1 update

Michael Good (MakeMusic, CG co-chair) presented a brief summary of the state of the MusicXML 3.1 development effort, with 37 issues currently open and an expected delivery date of no later than the end of Q3 2016. Michael also explained the basic procedure of how issues will be resolved using the GitHub issue/discussion/pull request workflow, and offered help on behalf of the co-chairs to any member of the CG who is daunted by or has questions about this workflow.

James Sutton (Dolphin Software) expressed concern about the noisiness of the emails generated by the GitHub issue/pull request workflow. He suggested that the ideal solution would be to provide a series of opt-ins/opt-outs for different kinds of automatic emails, if possible.

ACTION: The co-chairs agreed to investigate what possibilities might exist with their contacts at the W3C.

User stories

Werner Wolff (Notengrafik Berlin) prefaced Joe’s presentation on how user stories should inform the capabilities of the new notation representation by asking how we as a CG should engage the wider music writing community, and to get to the core of what music notation really means?

James Ingram suggested that the requirements identified by the MPEG-sponsored effort to define a new representation for music notation should be included in our user stories.

ACTION: James Ingram to produce a link to the MPEG user stories.

What should the scope of the effort be?

Following discussion of what kinds of musical works should be considered to be in scope for the capabilities of a new representation format, with a couple of examples cited by Joe including George Crumb’s Makrokosmos (with its circular staves) and Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude no. 15, or Raindrop Prelude (with note values that appear to exceed the time signature) posited as those that might be sufficiently complex that some aspects might be considered out of scope.

James Ingram and Werner Wolff were both of the opinion that all scores of all kinds should be representable in the standard. Zoltan Komives (Tido) argued that certainly if Chopin is considered out of scope, the scope is too narrow. Christof Schardt (PriMus Software) argued that the current version of MusicXML can represent the visual appearance of Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude quite adequately by reproducing the techniques used in engraving programs like Sibelius and Finale required to produce the desired appearance.

Werner Wolff raised the question of where graphical notation, as distinct from CWMN, can be considered to start? Does, say, a heart-shaped notehead constitute a graphical notation?

James Ingram suggested that it would be possible to use a combination of a purely visual representation (e.g. SVG) and a purely aural/temporal one (e.g. MIDI) to make it possible to capture these different semantic dimensions.

Ron Regev (Tonara) expressed that there is a conflict between making the standard all-encompassing on the one hand and easy to work with on the other, mirroring a point made in Joe’s slide that the tighter the semantic restrictions, in general the easier the format is to work with.

Encoding profiles

Joe presented the idea of encoding profiles for documents in the new notation representation, as a means of expressing the intent behind the encoding and informing a consuming application (and end user) what capabilities an application must have to be able to work with that particular document.

Thomas Weber suggested that the “menu” approach taken by the various kinds of Creative Commons license, presenting content creators with a set of checkbox options for what kinds of uses are permitted and prohibited, might be an approach to how an encoding profile could be made. Joe suggested that in fact each individual profile might be more like one of the checkboxes in the CC licensing set-up process.

Jan Rosseel (Scora) pointed out that if these profiles are going to work, they will need to be enforced in the editing applications used to author the content as well as in the documents themselves.

Zoltan Komives explained that profiles are a core part of the MEI framework, where they are known as customisations, and summarised their role as a contract between the producer of the data and the consumer of that data.

Architectural suggestions

Joe went on to present some suggestions about how the new notation representation could be architected, including the idea of cleanly separating semantic, visual styling, and performance (or playback) data in a manner similar to how the semantics and visual dimensions of web pages are separated into HTML (semantic) and CSS (visual). He also proposed that following the DOM approach makes creating interactive experiences driven from symbolic music representations easy. Joe demonstrated this with a toy application that uses a combination of MusicXML data, JQuery, HTML, CSS, and Noteflight’s embeddable MusicXML renderer, to produce a simple music theory quiz in a few dozen lines of code.

A video of Joe’s demo is accessible at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Bdm0H1VtA

with example source code at

https://gist.github.com/joeberkovitz/c3b37e3d818d7f4df26f11c53e8c8328.

Note that there is not yet any public, online version of the software shown here.

Adrian Holovaty (Soundslice) asked whether the proposal for CSS-like description of visual aspects of notation would actually use CSS, or a new language? Joe responded that it would make sense to borrow some of the CSS entities directly (e.g. color) but that there would be a lot of work to do in defining entities that make sense for music notation (e.g. dimensions might want to be expressed in stave units rather than in, say, pixels or points).

Zoltan Komives commented that music notation is a means of describing art with art, adding that Tido has found CSS to be insufficient to describe the visual aspects of music notation, and has already made some progress in defining a new language that attempts to do this. Joe asked Zoltan if he could share any observations about the unsuitability of CSS.

Action: Zoltan to prepare some comments for the CG about Tido’s experiences with using CSS to style music visually.

James Ingram presented the idea that the visual dimension can be thought of purely in terms of space, and the performance or aural dimension can be thought of purely in terms of time: in his view, everything is either time or space. This seemed to be a controversial view among the attendees of the meeting, with Alexander Plötz asking whether information about the forces required to perform a work (e.g. labeling one of the staves as being played by a flute) would be considered “space” or “time” in James’s division of responsibilities, to which James replied that it would be “space.”

Thomas Weber commented that he felt it would be necessary to extend the DOM in the same way that SVG has done in order to make the kinds of high-level interactive experiences outlined by our user stories possible; in particular, Thomas expressed concern about how to handle the complex relationships between different entities, e.g. to ensure that if you edit the duration of one note in a bar, this may well have consequences for other notes in the same and indeed other bars. Music is not as cleanly hierarchical as other standards or types of content. Michael suggested that XPath or other similar technologies might be useful to help link separate entities together and move towards solving this problem.

Adrian Holovaty expressed concern about using DOM programming to achieve these interactive user stories because this approach implies that the music notation representation is transmitted in full to the client’s computer, which may have implications both for performance and security (e.g. rights management). Adrian explained that although Soundslice uses MusicXML for the representation of the music, it is transmitted to the end user’s browser by way of an intermediate format. He expressed concern that developers and rights holders alike might find obstacles and objections to this approach.

Thoughts on scope and feasibility

As the meeting drew towards its close, the attendees returned to the discussion of what the scope of what the CG can hope to achieve might be.

Werner Wolff appealed for keeping the scope as broad as possible, while recognising that the music industry is small in comparison with other industries, and resources (time and money) are comparatively scarce. However, he did not want the CG’s work to immediately head to the lowest common denominator and leave many niches of musical expression on the outside.

Reinhold Hoffmann (Notation Software) made the counterpoint that the CG’s work must be market-driven, based on what is feasible from a time and effort perspective, and geared towards the needs of consumers; in other words, a pragmatic approach.

Christof Schardt expressed support for the need that the new representation format must break compatibility with MusicXML in order to be able to solve the big problems. Michael responded that he agreed that breaking changes would be necessary, but cautioned against making breaking changes only on the grounds of preferring the elegance of a new solution. To minimise the effort required by those applications and technologies that already support MusicXML, if a use case is already adequately met by an existing capability of MusicXML, the CG should not be in a hurry to throw it away purely because we have come up with a more elegant solution.

The co-chairs thanked the attendees for their attendance and participation in the meeting, which closed with a drinks reception generously sponsored by Newzik.

Attendee list

• Manfred Knauff, Apple
• Dominique Vandenneucker, Arpege / MakeMusic
• Jan Angermüller, self
• Ainhoa Esténoz, Blackbinder
• Sergio Peñalver, Blackbinder
• Gorka Urzaiz, Blackbinder
• Brenda Cameron, Cambrian Software
• Dominik Hörnel, capella software
• Bernd Jungmann, capella software
• Wincent Balin, Columbus Soft
• Christof Schardt, Columbus Soft
• James Sutton, Dolphin Computing
• Hans Jakobsen, Earmaster
• James Ingram, self
• Michael Good, MakeMusic
• Thomas Bonte, Musescore
• Mogens Lundholm, MusicXML-Player
• Bob Hamblok, neoScores
• Aurélia Azoulay, Newzik
• Pierre Madron, Newzik
• Raphaël Schumann, Newzik
• Reinhold Hoffmann, Notation Software
• Martin Marris, Notecraft Services
• Joe Berkovitz, Noteflight
• Werner J Wolff, Notengrafik Berlin
• Thomas Weber, Notengrafik Berlin
• Werner Eickhoff-Maschitzki, Notengrafik Eickhoff, Freiburg
• Francesca Galofré, Notes in Cloud
• Tomàs Genís, Notes in Cloud
• Leonid Peleshev, self
• Alexander Plötz, self
• Fivos Kefallonitis, PrimaVista
• Jan Rosseel, Scora
• Adrian Holovaty, Soundslice
• Daniel Spreadbury, Steinberg
• Zoltán Kőmíves, Tido
• Ron Regev, Tonara
• Lauri Toivio, Uusinta Publishing
• Robin Kidd, Yamaha