Co-chair Meeting Minutes: August 13, 2019

MNX-Common by Example

Adrian has added a section on time signatures to the MNX-Common by Example page to illustrate the approach MNX-Common takes to time signatures, showing how time signatures are shown in the global element. The co-chairs discussed whether or not we should include the optional index attribute to each measure element that makes the bar number explicit, but decided to keep it as simple as possible for the purposes of this example.

The co-chairs discussed the issue of multi-metric music, which requires multiple global elements and the assigning of specific parts to the time signatures in each global element. There was also further discussion of whether index should be compulsory, which would enable a sparse representation of the global element, i.e. only including those measure elements in which there is a change of time signature, but this would require making index compulsory and it was decided not to revisit this prior decision again now.

Octave lines

Adrian is next going to look at giving examples of octave lines in MusicXML. Octave lines are an example of a spanning element, which appear either in the directions attribute of a measure element (if they apply to all voices) or of a sequence attribute (if they apply to a specific voice). We need to be clear about the end attribute and whether or not the note or event at that position is transposed by the octave line.

Adrian will work up an example for discussion and then move to adding octave lines to the spec. This will be relevant to issue #111.

MusicXML 3.2 and SMuFL 1.4 update

There was no discussion of MusicXML 3.2 or SMuFL 1.4 in this meeting.

Next meeting

The next co-chair meeting will be on 27 August 2019.