Co-chair meeting minutes: March 20, 2025

MNX

Adrian has committed the changes to encoding of ties as discussed in the last co-chairs’ meeting, per issue #396, which is now closed.

Related to discussion #366, we revisited the need for useAccidentalDisplay. Because we propose to add the force key on the accidentalDisplay object, which would capture the semantics of whether the accidental was automatic or explicitly specified, there’s an argument that useAccidentalDisplay becomes redundant.

In Adrian’s mind, the original idea behind useAccidentalDisplay was to differentiate between “the absence of data” means “null” versus “false”: it provides a shorthand to avoid having to encode information on every single note.

The most compelling case we could think of was the difficulty in distinguishing between an MNX document saved from, say, a MIDI sequencer that doesn’t write out accidentals and an MNX document that simply doesn’t require any displayed accidentals because all of the music is unaltered relative to its key signature. For pure renderers (e.g. Vexflow) that do not have the capability to calculate accidentals, the one advantage of having an explicit useAccidentalDisplay object is that it would allow them to display some kind of warning that the pitches may not be displayed.

Myke will add comments to the relevant discussions based on our discussions in this meeting.

Next meeting

The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Thursday 27 March 2025.