MNX Specification Working Group meeting: June 16, 2026

Dynamics

Adrian has added the work to date on dynamics to the specification. After further discussion in the meeting today, we have settled on a system that provides four dynamic types: immediate, gradual, relative, accent.

For the case of fp dynamics, there’s an “attackValue” (allowing a distinction between attack value and persisted value) for immediate dynamics.

To specify the end of a hairpin, there’s an “end”, matching how ottavas are encoded (as opposed to the original idea of giving the hairpin a duration).

There’s a “glyphs” array, allowing the encoding of a specific series of SMuFL glyphs, for cases where the enum of dynamic values doesn’t include what should be visually rendered.

Instead of rich text (which would by definition require the redundancy of encoding the dynamic value twice), there’s a “prefix” and “suffix”, both of which are strings.

There’s a “relative” type, for dynamics such as “più p” (meaning “quieter”).

We’ve also decided to add “n” (niente) to the dynamic value enum.

Measure repeats

Adrian has created issue #520 with a proposal for measure repeats, based on the discussion in our previous meeting. We welcome community feedback on this proposal.

Beat repeats

We spent the remainder of the meeting discussing potential approaches for beat repeats, or slashes. A couple of promising approaches presented themselves, but we will discuss further in our next meeting and then formulate a proposal.

Next meeting

The next MNX specification working group meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 30 June 2026.