Co-chair Meeting Minutes: February 4, 2020
Musikmesse 2020
Michael has submitted an enquiry to the Musikmesse organisers about the arrangements for our planned Community Group meeting for the show but as yet there is no news. We will provide an update as soon as we get one from Messe Frankfurt.
MNX-Common
Based on a suggestion from Bob Hamblok, the MNX-Common by Example page has been updated to encode the XML tags in a way that avoids unsightly URL-encoding, which helps make the source (and therefore the diffs) more readable.
In the last co-chair meeting, we discussed the possibility of reworking the proposed elements for dynamics (currently consisting of dynamics, wedge, cresc and dim) to a single dynamics element with different child elements to describe the different kinds of instantaneous and gradually-changing dynamics. Adrian has put some time into this, but has found few concrete advantages to this approach beyond the syntactic sugar it would provide; since dynamics are already contained within a directions element they can already be grouped reasonably effectively. As such, the co-chairs agreed that we should not pursue this idea any further for the time being, and instead Adrian will focus on producing some examples based on the current specification for the MNX-Common by Example page.
We discussed expanding the allowed values for the dynamics element to include a greater variety of dynamics like sfz or fp that represent a dynamic change immediately following the attack of the note, and proposed that we might add a separator to the microsyntax so that dynamics like mf-ff or mp-p can also be encoded. Note that this would not cater for cases where different dynamics should be played on different passes through the music in a repeat structure; we briefly discussed this aspect and agreed that a higher-level concept of some kind (perhaps based on the existing time-only attribute in MusicXML, or perhaps a new element that could be used to wrap elements that should only apply on a particular pass through the music) would be necessary for this.
We also agreed that subito could be encoded by way of a new attribute for the dynamics element, and Adrian will consider how this might be done.
Next meeting
The next co-chair meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 18 February 2020.
