Co-chair meeting minutes: November 9, 2023

MNX

Adrian has made the changes for issues #313 and #314 for the encoding of positions within a bar and clef positions. Changes have been made to both the MNX specification and the MNX examples.

Adrian has also been working on the MNX converter. He’s updated the converter to handle the change in how sequences are encoded in the new top-level sequences object. Clefs, including inner-bar clef changes, are also now handled in the MNX converter, along with a new test case for clefs in MusicXML. Adrian has also improved the error handling in the MNX converter, showing a descriptive error message rather than the Python traceback. Based on a suggestion from Mogens Lundholm (issue #3), errors for invalid elements in MusicXML file now show the line number of the invalid entry. Next, Adrian plans to implement grace notes in the MNX converter (issue #7).

We discussed how to encode unpitched notes (issue #316), and came to the consensus that we should encode unpitched material using staff position rather than relative to a specific clef. Adrian will work this up into a formal proposal shortly.

Finally, and further to our last meeting, we discussed the community feedback on the numbering of staff positions (issue #315), and agreed that we will proceed as described. We decided that we would assume that when we come to describe the distances between staff lines, we would limit them to integral values as multiples of this staff position unit (which can be thought of as half a space, or half a standard notehead’s height).

Next meeting

The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Thursday 24 November 2023.