Co-chairs meeting minutes: November 18, 2025

MNX

With regard to the proposal for formatted text (discussion #459), the co-chairs plan to go ahead with the current proposal. We’re grateful for the feedback we’ve already received, but of course welcome more from the community. The next question is where this formatted text will first be used in the specification.

We spent the majority of the meeting discussing how we might extend the specification of the tempo object to use formatted text for the presentation of tempo marks. We think adding a text property to the tempo object is uncontroversial, but the approach for how to encode the visual appearance of metronome marks raises issues that we want to discuss further in our next meeting before preparing a proposal for feedback.

We also discussed the related but separate issue of rhythmic feel markings (for swing, shuffle, etc.) and tempo equations or metric modulations. We agreed that in the first instance these would be handled separately from tempo markings, in order to keep our proposal focused on the encoding of tempo text and metronome marks.

We also discussed the issue raised by Robert Patterson concerning beams with only one event (discussion #461). We would prefer that the array of event IDs for a beam should contain a minimum of two events, but unfortunately it is necessary for secondary beams to be able to specify only a single event ID (to encode partial or fractional beams), so we will instead specify a minimum of one event ID for the array in a beam. We also discussed the ambiguity between a beam containing only one note and an unbeamed note with a straight flag, and agreed that in principle we should make it possible to specify the type of flag to be used for a note, including an enumeration for its type (curved, straight angled, straight perpendicular to the stem, etc.) and its direction (whether it points left or right). We will return to this in future.

Next meeting

The next co-chairs meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 2 December 2025.