Co-chair Meeting Minutes: November 26, 2019
MNX-Common
Closing existing pull requests
Pull request #170, for making the <head> element optional, and pull request #171, specifying the approach to encoding barlines, have both been merged into the specification.
Slurs as liaison content
Pull request #169, concerning slurs as liaison content, has seen several new commits since the last meeting, and some good discussion with the community. The co-chairs discussed Adrian’s most recent proposal that slurs should be associated with the <event> element rather than the <note> element, though with the understanding that so-called “inner slurs” – where, for example, there are tied outer notes in a chord, and a slur between two notes in the middle of the tied chord must be indicated by drawing the slur directly next to those notes, rather than either above or below the whole chord – must be accommodated. The proposal for accommodating “inner slurs” is that each end of the slur may optionally refer to a note element by ID (using XML idref, which can be validated to the point that the ID is present in the document, though it cannot be validated to the point that the ID actually belongs to a note).
Furthermore, the co-chairs discussed the issue of incomplete slurs, for example when encoding a music example that either begins or ends with an incompletely specified slur (i.e. going to or coming from an unknown note). This situation is handled for ties, so the proposal is that the same technique should be extended to slurs as well.
There has also been some discussion (e.g. #167 and #169) concerning how MNX-Common can make it as straightforward as possible for consuming applications to determine which notes are under the slur, for example for the purposes of enhancing playback of slurred notes. The co-chairs discussed this and agreed that it is important for MNX-Common’s approach to encoding slurs should make the common case – where a slur starts and ends in the same voice – as straightforward as possible, but that it should not be expected to encode this directly, or to handle more difficult situations, such as a slur starting in one voice and ending in the other, where the boundary between the slur affecting one voice and the next is inherently unclear.
Ties in MNX-Common by example
Adrian has added a new Ties section to the MNX by Example page, showing how ties are specified in MNX-Common.
Dynamics
Issue #168 has been raised about the current specification for dynamics in the MNX-Common specification. The co-chairs discussed the proposal made by Peter Jonas (@shoogle) and they agree that the specification as it stands is probably too restrictive and does not reflect the richness of how dynamics are really used in CWMN, but more discussion and reflection is needed in this area. Daniel agreed to add some further comments based on the discussion in the meeting to the issue to encourage further discussion.
In-person meeting at The NAMM Show
There will be no official meeting of the W3C Music Notation Community Group meeting at the NAMM Show, but Michael will still organise a dinner for anybody who wishes to attend. Michael will share further details in due course.
Next meeting
The next co-chair meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 17 December 2019.
