Co-chair meeting minutes: May 25, 2023

(Apologies for the late posting of these minutes.)

In-person meeting, MOLA Conference Tech Fair, June 2, 2023

Our next in-person meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 2 June 2023. If you are able to join us in person at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin, we look forward to seeing you there. Otherwise, please join us via Zoom.

Meeting ID: 843 5670 2243
Passcode: 170077

The meeting is at 1330 UTC / 1430 BST / 1530 CEDT / 0930 EDT / 0630 PDT on Friday 2 June.

The agenda for the meeting is as follows:

• Introduction to the W3C Music Notation Community Group
• MusicXML 4.1 status update
• SMuFL 1.5 status update
• MNX status update
  • Reasons for switching to JSON
  • The role of microformats in MNX
  • Milestones towards 1.0
• Lightning presentations from community members
• Open discussion

MNX

Adrian has finished the conversion of the main MNX specification to reflect the new JSON syntax. There are a few dark corners remaining to be updated, but the bulk of the work is done; all of the examples are now in JSON, and the page comparing MNX to MusicXML now uses JSON for all of its comparisons.

The next step is to open some issues with the various questions that Adrian had to grapple with in the process of performing the conversion. The most interesting question arising is concerning styles: styles have two components, classes (which allow you to define a named style that can be applied to any object), and styling based on element names. The problem with the latter is that, of course, the new JSON version of MNX has no named elements: instead, it uses anonymous objects. Adrian proposes that to achieve this we will probably need to define an enumeration of item names that can be used to identify and locate items of particular types.

Adrian also plans to update the mnxconverter to output JSON in the near future.

Next co-chairs’ meeting

The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Thursday 8 June 2023.