The Music Notation Community Group develops and maintains format and language specifications for notated music used by web, desktop, and mobile applications. The group aims to serve a broad range of users engaging in music-related activities involving notation, and will document these use cases.
The Community Group documents, maintains and updates the MusicXML and SMuFL (Standard Music Font Layout) specifications. The goals are to evolve the specifications to handle a broader set of use cases and technologies, including use of music notation on the web, while maximizing the existing investment in implementations of the existing MusicXML and SMuFL specifications.
The group is developing a new specification to embody this broader set of use cases and technologies, under the working title of MNX. The group is proposing the development of an additional new specification to provide a standard, machine-readable source of musical instrument data.
w3c/smuflGroup's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
After 44 years as a software engineer, I have decided to retire soon after my 65th birthday. My last day at MakeMusic will be Friday, January 6, 2023. At that time, I will step down from being co-chair of the W3C Music Notation Community Group, while remaining a group member.
The second half of my career has been spent in music notation software. I founded Recordare in 2000 to develop the MusicXML music notation standard, and MakeMusic acquired Recordare’s assets in 2011.
I envisioned Recordare as an Internet music publishing company. It didn’t get there on its own, but that is what we have today with the combination of MakeMusic and Alfred in Peaksware Music Brands. Meanwhile, the W3C Music Notation Community Group has provided an excellent organizational home for the MusicXML standard.
We will be discussing plans for future leadership of the W3C Music Notation Community Group at our annual meeting on September 15. I hope to see many of you there.
The pull request #285 for multi-measure rests (issue #284) has been merged and is complete. The remaining work to encode “old-style” multi-bar rests will be tackled later, and issue #286 has been raised to cover this.
Adrian is working on a proposal for the encoding of note spelling in different score/part contexts (issue #34) and hopes to have something ready to share ahead of the next co-chair meeting.
Community Group meeting, 15 September 2022
Our community group meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 15 September 2022 at 8:00am San Francisco, 11:00am New York, 4:00pm London, 5:00pm Frankfurt, 12:00am (Friday) Tokyo.
The agenda for the meeting is as follows:
Introduction to the Music Notation CG
Project updates
MNX
SMuFL
Instrument data
MusicXML
Organisational changes
Q&A
The co-chairs invite community group members to propose further agenda items that they would like to be added to the meeting by sending their suggestions via the public-music-notation CG mailing list.
As a reminder, the meeting is part of W3C TPAC 2022. As a reminder, if you are planning to attend any other sessions at the conference, you should register before 1 September. Please be aware that registration for this year’s TPAC attracts a fee, unlike last year’s conference. If you only plan to attend our Community Group meeting, then you do not need to register for TPAC, but you do need to register your intention to attend by completing this form. If you do not register, either for TPAC or by completing our registration form, you will not be able to attend the meeting.
Our community group meeting is scheduled to take place on 15 September 2022 as part of W3C TPAC 2022. If you are planning to attend any other sessions at the conference, you should register before 1 September. Please be aware that registration for this year’s TPAC attracts a fee, unlike last year’s conference. If you only plan to attend our Community Group meeting, then you do not need to register for TPAC, but you do need to register your intention to attend by completing this form. If you do not register, either for TPAC or by completing our registration form, you will not be able to attend the meeting.
As a reminder, the meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 15 September 2022 at 8:00am San Francisco, 11:00am New York, 4:00pm London, 5:00pm Frankfurt, 12:00am (Friday) Tokyo.
MNX
Adrian has created pull request #285 for issue #284 concerning the encoding of multi-measure rests. We plan to merge this pull request by the end of the week, so if you have any further feedback, please provide it as soon as possible. Use the links in the pull request to view the updated specification and the examples directly.
Next, Adrian will start working on the encoding of note spelling in different layouts (related to issue #34), following some earlier discussion between the co-chairs (May 24, 2022 meeting). Adrian will create a new issue with a proposal for this soon.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 30 August 2022.
There has been some good discussion concerning the proposal for how to encode multimeasure rests (issue #284), and Adrian has charted a course through the feedback provided by the community to settle on a new proposal which can be found in this comment. Michael pointed out that we are using the term “measure” rather than “bar” in MNX so we will standardise on this term when encoding multimeasure rests as well.
We welcome any further feedback from the community, but absent any major objections we plan to move this to the pull request stage in the near future.
Next co-chairs’ meeting
Due to holidays, the next co-chairs’ meeting will be in four weeks on Tuesday 16 August.
Adrian has created issue #284 with four possible approaches for encoding multi-bar rests in MNX. Some of the approaches use the new layouts system in MNX more than others, and the choice of proposal will probably come down to a decision about how much or little we want to use this system. The co-chairs discussed whether or not it is a requirement for multi-bar rests to have different configurations within the same part in different scenarios (using the same part in different layouts), and determined that this was not a requirement, which means that any of the proposals could be used. Community group members are invited to provide their feedback on the proposals.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 19 July 2022.
Adrian has begun working on encoding multi-bar rests in MNX in service of issue #34, and will create a new issue with his proposal and one or two example documents within the next couple of days. We will be glad to receive feedback from community group members about this new proposal.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 5 July 2022.
Community Group meeting: Thursday 15 September 2022
We have had confirmation from the organisers of TPAC 2022 that the Music Notation Community Group meeting will take place as part of the conference proceedings on Thursday 15 September 2022 at 0800 PDT (Vancouver time), 1100 EDT (New York), 1600 BST (London), 1700 CEST (Berlin), 0000 JST (Tokyo).
This will be an online-only meeting: there is no need to go to Vancouver in person for the TPAC conference to participate in this meeting. An invitation for the time and date has already been sent to the music-notation-public mailing list so you can add it to your calendar. Details for how to register for the conference (which is free of charge) and to attend the online meeting will be made available in due course.
Date of next meeting
Because this meeting was delayed by one week due to illness, the next co-chairs’ meeting will be in one week on Tuesday 21 June 2022.
The co-chairs had a productive discussion to guide the initial proposals for issue #34, concerning the differences between score and part layouts. Adrian had identified five specific areas that should certainly be considered: note spelling; stem direction; initial clefs; multi-bar rests; and cues.
After some discussion about different potential approaches to cues, the co-chairs agreed that we would discuss that issue separately, as there is sufficient complexity to warrant designing a solution on its own terms.
For note spelling, stem direction and clefs, the co-chairs agreed that it should be sufficient in most cases to encode an optional alternate spelling and stem direction to be used when the music is viewed at sounding or concert pitch (since MNX encodes everything at written or transposed pitch), with the additional proposal that it should be possible to define an alternative transposition for an instrument in each layout, and a corresponding alternate initial clef, to cater for simple cases defining mutiple layouts with different transpositions for the same instrument.
For multi-bar rests, the co-chairs agreed that it would be sufficient to define ranges of multi-bar rests in layouts in a simple way, and Adrian will begin the work on issue #34 by forming a proposal for the encoding of multi-bar rests, before proceeding to tackle note spelling, stem direction, and clefs.
Community Group meeting
We have not received any negative feedback that suggests that holding our next Community Group meeting as part of the hybrid TPAC 2022 conference will be a problem, so we will be submitting a proposal to the TPAC organisers to schedule our meeting on Thursday 15 September 2022 as discussed in the last co-chairs’ meeting. We will advise CG members on the outcome of this proposal as soon as we hear back from the organisers.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 7 June 2022.
Pull request #282 which addresses the proposal for styling of MNX elements (issue #263) has been merged. You can read the specification for the style element here, and Adrian has also provided some examples of styling:
In addition, Adrian has written an algorithm for resolving which styles apply to a particular element (found here under Algorithm for calculating an element’s applied styles).
The work to date specifies the infrastructure for styling, but at the present time, the only actual style property that is defined in the specification is color. Adrian has created issue #283 to capture initial discussion about the style properties that should be added; as consensus emerges, we will then create separate issues to capture the specification of individual style properties. Adrian proposes that the next style property that we should fully specify should be for specification of the music font.
As previously discussed, Adrian also plans to start drawing out ideas for how to specify the differences between score and part layouts (issue #34). Work on this larger issue can proceed in parallel with considerations for specific style properties.
TPAC 2022 meeting
This year’s W3C TPAC will be taking place in Vancouver, Canada from 12-16 September 2022 as a hybrid event, mixing in-person and virtual attendees. We are considering requesting a slot in the schedule for Thursday 15 September 2022, so that our Community Group meeting for this year would take place at TPAC as it did last year. We have to submit our proposal within the next two weeks, so if you have any strong objections to our meeting taking place at TPAC or on this date, please post to the public-music-notation-contrib mailing list as soon as possible. We anticipate that we three co-chairs would be attending virtually rather than travelling to Vancouver, but if you would be interested in attending the conference in person, please also let us know via the mailing list.
We will finalise our decision at the next meeting of the co-chairs in two weeks’ time, so please provide your feedback as soon as possible.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 24 May 2022.
At our last meeting we asked for feedback from the community concerning the proposed change to the styling proposal to unify the element and class attributes for the style element (pull request #282). The feedback we received was positive, so Adrian will proceed to merge this pull request shortly. Adrian will need to finalise the documentation for the new style element (largely based on Joe Berkovitz’s original proposal in issue #263) and write a few more examples, then this issue will be resolved.
After this is completed, Adrian will continue to investigate the errors Michael has reported with converting MusicXML with the MNX converter, and then attention will turn to issue #34, concerning differences between parts and scores.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 10 May 2022.
w3c/smufl
