NAMM 2019 Meeting Minutes

The W3C Music Notation Community Group met at Room 201C in the Anaheim Convention Center during the 2019 NAMM trade show, on Friday, January 25, 2019 between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm.

The meeting was chaired by CG co-chairs Daniel Spreadbury and Michael Good, and was attended by 25 members of the CG and interested guests. The slides from the meeting can be found at

W3C MNCG NAMM 2019 Meeting Slides

Philip Rothman from the Scoring Notes blog video recorded the meeting and has posted it on YouTube. Dominik Svoboda audio recorded the meeting and his audio is included in the video. The video starting times for each part of the meeting are included in the headings below.

Introduction to the W3C MNCG (Starts at 0:02)

Daniel Spreadbury introduced the W3C and the Music Notation Community Group. Daniel reiterated the importance of joining the group in order to make any contributions to the work of the group on SMuFL, MusicXML, and MNX. The web user interface for joining the group is not very easy, so please reach out to one of the co-chairs if you have difficulties.

Daniel discussed the changes in the group over the past year, in particular the change of co-chair from Joe Berkovitz to Adrian Holovaty. Given Joe’s absence, MNX was largely static over the last 6 months of 2018, but we look forward to resuming progress with Adrian’s leadership on MNX. Daniel will continue to lead work on SMuFL and Michael will continue to lead work on MusicXML. Adrian was not able to attend this year’s NAMM but does plan to attend our Musikmesse meeting.

SMuFL (Starts at 7:39)

Daniel Spreadbury led a discussion of the current status and future plans for SMuFL. Our immediate goal is to release a W3C Community Group Final Report for SMuFL 1.3. There was a previous draft 1.2 version of SMuFL, but this did not make it to an official Community Report.

At the time of the meeting the draft of the final report was close to publication but not yet released. (It was published at https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/ a few days after the meeting.) The main changes include new ranges for Kahnotation and German organ tablature, along with extensions to a few existing ranges and more stylistic alternates.

Currently there are 7 fonts available that support SMuFL: Bravura, Petaluma, Gootville, Leipzig, November 2, and MTF-Cadence. Bravura is intended as the reference font for SMuFL and contains all the glyphs that are part of the SMuFL 1.3 report. The other fonts cover the common music notation ranges but not the complete list of SMuFL ranges.

After the final Community Group Report is released for SMuFL 1.3, SMuFL will continue to evolve. There are around 30 issues currently outstanding that were not addressed in 1.3, and a 1.4 release is possible later in 2019.

We look forward to reviews of the draft report. The SMuFL GitHub repository is the preferred location for reporting issues. We expect to have at least 2 weeks for review after the draft report is published.

Hans Landval Jakobsen asked if there are any font technology requirements such as TrueType for SMuFL fonts. Daniel replied that there are no font technology requirements aside from being able to support code points in the Private Use Area of the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane. All SMuFL fonts released so far have been OpenType fonts, including OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines.

MusicXML (Starts at 22:06)

MusicXML 3.1 was released in December 2017 so no changes have been made in MusicXML since then. Companies have been busy implementing MusicXML 3.1 features over the past year.

Michael proposed starting work on a new version of MusicXML in parallel with ongoing MNX development work. This is a change from the previous plan where we wanted to wrap up MusicXML 3.1 development to focus on MNX. However, with the changes in the working group co-chairs and evolving needs for MusicXML exchange, it seems to make sense now to work on both in parallel.

Michael discussed potential issues that could drive a MusicXML 3.2 release. The exchange of information about the differences between score and parts has become a key pain point for MakeMusic’s work in exchanging between its Finale and SmartMusic products. This is something MakeMusic would like to see resolved in a standard fashion, rather than a MakeMusic-specific workaround. A related issue is MusicXML 3.1’s incomplete support for concert scores that are associated with transposed parts. Currently there are 92 open MusicXML issues at Github, so there is plenty of scope for choosing what to work on for a 3.2 release.

Doug LeBow asked if any of the major music preparation houses has seen the list of potential MusicXML issues. Michael expects that nobody has looked at this list in a long time, but now would be a good time for people to join the Community Group to help drive the selection of MusicXML 3.2 issues. The list of issues could also be cleaned up and tentatively organized into a MusicXML 3.2 milestone.

Jason Freeman asked if there was a reference implementation for MusicXML, or could there be? The Community Group had earlier decided to postpone the issue of a reference implementation to work on MNX. For MusicXML, Finale is probably the most complete implementation, but it is not a reference implementation – it is neither complete nor open source.

Jeff Kellem suggested that building up a standard test suite over time could be an important contribution for developers. Michael agreed and thought this was more feasible than a reference implementation – we could start small and iterate over time, independent of MusicXML releases.

MNX (Starts at 39:35)

We have an initial draft MNX specification available at GitHub. The co-chairs believe it provides a solid technical foundation, but there is still a lot of work ahead to get to a complete draft.

Our plans for 2019 are to ramp back up on MNX development. We plan to start by finalizing a set of interrelated issues regarding pitch representation, including using written pitch vs sounding pitch and encoding the relationship between score and parts. We would like to have a discussion of this at our Musikmesse meeting and get these issues resolved shortly afterwards.

Doug said that MusicXML and MNX each have their own strengths, so developing them in parallel seems like a good idea. But he is unclear on what exactly MNX can add to what MusicXML already does. Michael responded that this is a common source of confusion, and Adrian is planning to write a document to help address what we are trying to accomplish with MNX.

Jeremey Sawruk suggested that if we are going to do MusicXML and MNX development in parallel, perhaps we could develop the test suites in parallel as well. That might clarify some of the differences between the two formats.

In general, the attendees at this meeting appeared to agree that doing MNX and MusicXML development in parallel was a good idea.

Next Steps (Starts at 48:15)

We discussed next steps for the Community Group, including our plans for meeting at Musikmesse, which will be held in Frankfurt between April 2 – 5.

Fabrizio Ferrari asked about ways to communicate more often aside from the two face-to-face meetings and the nitty-gritty of the individual GitHub issues. Perhaps the co-chairs could send out a periodic digest of the issues we are discussing? Chris Koszuta suggested sending this digest out on a weekend to avoid conflicts with an overload of other business emails. Jason suggested sending out summaries of the co-chair meetings.

Chris also suggested simulcasting the face-to-face meetings for people who could not travel to the USA or Europe, as the discussions tend to be different with the different attendees. This can be difficult due to lack of budget and the Internet service not always being reliable at shows. We are thankful for the work of Philip Rothman and Peter Jonas in making video recordings of these meetings which get posted afterwards, but these do not allow for real-time interactive discussion.

Doug suggested that we have interim video face-to-face meetings using Zoom, which he would be willing to host.

Michael suggested possibly using a Slack channel or channels for ongoing chat discussion. There seemed to be many Slack users attending this meeting, so this seems worth investigating.

Daniel reminded the group that we have greatly reduced notifications from our GitHub repositories. So if you unsubscribed or filtered these notifications in past because there were too many of them, please reconsider as the notifications now go out only at key points like pull requests.

The co-chairs will be discussing these suggestions and plan to make proposals for more effective communication within the Community Group.

Later that evening, many of the attendees met for our 3rd annual dinner at Thai Nakorn restaurant in Garden Grove.

Attendees

Franck Duhamel, Arobas Music
David Gros, Arobas Music
Hans Landval Jakobsen, EarMaster
Jason Freeman, Georgia Institute of Technology
Asa Doyle, Hal Leonard
Chris Koszuta, Hal Leonard
Jeremy Sawruk, J.W. Pepper
Doug LeBow, self
Johannes Biglmaier, M3C
Michael Good, MakeMusic
Dominique Vandenneucker, MakeMusic
Duncan Hearn, Musicnotes
Jon Higgins, Musicnotes
Steve Morell, NiceChart
John Mlynczak, Noteflight
Philip Rothman, NYC Music Services / Scoring Notes
Eric Carraway, percuss.io
Jennifer Amaya, Riverside City College
Jeff Kellem, Slanted Hall
Daniel Spreadbury, Steinberg
Dominik Svoboda, self
Pierre Rannou, Tutteo (Flat)
Jan Vasina, self
Fabrizio Ferrari, Virtual Sheet Music
Kevin Weed, self