MNX Specification Working Group meeting: May 26, 2026

Dynamics

Adrian has put together a proposal for the encoding of dynamics (issue #518) which is now ready for community feedback. However, we quickly got involved in discussing the text object, and how it didn’t feel quite right that in common cases (such as “sempre f“) it would be necessary to effectively encode the value of the dynamic (f) twice, once in the value field and then again using a SMuFL glyph in the text field.

We propose that instead we should have prefix and suffix fields that contain a plain string that can be drawn to either side of the dynamic value. In this way, text only needs to be specified for very unusual cases.

We also talked at length about modifiers, and ended up with a proposal of the values for an enumeration that can go alongside value (containing, among others, “more”, “less”, “immediately”, “as much as possible”, etc.).

This led us to consider dynamics that express an immediate relative change, such as “a little louder” or “much softer”, and so we propose that we will add a new relative dynamic type.

Adrian will extend the issue with formal proposals for these aspects, and we look forward to reading feedback from the community about them.

Measure and beat repeats

We had planned to discuss bar/measure and beat repeats (issue #122) but ran out of time. We will consider this in our next meeting. If any members of the community would like to bring any specific concerns in this area to our attention, we invite you to add details to issue #122 ahead of our next meeting.

Next meeting

The specification working group will next meet on Tuesday 2 June 2026.