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.
Pull request #282 concerning the proposals for styling (issue #263) continues to attract some good feedback. In particular, Samuel Bradshaw suggested that instead of using separate attributes for element and class, MNX could instead use a single selector attribute for the style element, using a very limited subset of the CSS syntax for selectors that are used to identify IDs and classes. Adrian is in favour of this change as it seems more elegant, so although it will require a reasonably large set of changes to the proposal it is still not too late. If any community group members have any thoughts on this change, please comment on the pull request.
Michael has sent some MusicXML files that cause the mnxconverter to throw errors when converting to MNX, and Adrian is also working on addressing these errors.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 26 April 2022.
The co-chairs would welcome some more feedback on pull request #282, which has as yet attracted surprisingly little engagement from the community. This is an important aspect of the MNX specification, and we want to be sure that the community agrees with the proposal before we merge the pull request. Even if you have no suggested changes to the proposal, indicating your agreement by a simple comment or using one of the supplied emoji buttons would be welcomed.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 12 April 2022.
It was recently announced that Musikmesse 2022, which had been scheduled for 29 April–1 May 2022, has been cancelled, and the B2B part of the fair has been cancelled permanently. The co-chairs are considering some alternative events and conferences that might possibly be a future home for our in-person meetings in Europe:
Open source:FOSDEM, normally in Brussels in February.
W3C:TPAC, which rotates around the world, and in 2022 is expected to be in Vancouver, Canada, and it’s not clear when it will next be in Europe.
Consumer-facing:Musikpark in Leipzig, Germany in June; Musik Austria in Ried im Innkreis, Austria in May.
Academic:Music Encoding Conference in May, this year in Canada; TENOR in May, this year in Marseille, France; ISMIR in November or December, this year in India.
Music librarians:MOLA Conference in June, this year in Philadelphia, USA; in Berlin, Germany in 2023.
We could also consider meeting at IRCAM in Paris, or at Steinberg’s headquarters in Hamburg.
We welcome any further suggestions of events, conferences or organisations that could host our in-person meetings, and feedback on whether any of the above would be preferable.
MNX
Adrian has created pull request #282 to cover the proposal for styling attributes in issue #263, and welcomes feedback. Adrian has written a synopsis in the pull request itself as an introduction, and invites the community to digest the pull request and provide further feedback.
Adrian will next turn his attention to developing a proposal for how to handle the differences between full scores and instrumental parts, for issue #34.
SMuFL
Daniel has started some initial work on SMuFL 1.5, with the intention of producing a new revision of the specification by the end of 2022. He has created a SMuFL 1.5 milestone on GitHub and has reviewed all of the existing open issues, assigning 30 of the 48 open issues to that milestone for consideration and potentially implementation. An updated set of labels has also been added, and these labels have been applied to the existing issues.
Daniel has also decided to use mdBook instead of GitBook to produce future versions of the specification, and the current editor’s draft is now using the new mdBook output. mdBook is more lightweight than GitBook, has a better author-test-publish workflow than GitBook, and produces output with a better user experience, including enhanced search.
One of the issues that we hope to address in the next revision is #214, to provide translations for the human-readable names in the glyphnames.json and ranges.json SMuFL metadata files. The co-chairs are currently evaluating a pair of online translation management tools (Transifex and POEditor), both of which provide a free service to open source projects.
We have also enabled the GitHub Discussions area for any questions about how to use SMuFL, announcements about any new software that implements SMuFL support, and so on. Please feel free to make use of this new discussion platform.
If you have any issues that you would like to be considered for inclusion in SMuFL 1.5, please ensure they have been raised on GitHub as soon as possible so that we can start to bring the scope of the new version into focus.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 29 March 2022.
We have now implemented the GitHub Discussions feature for the MusicXML repository as agreed at the last co-chair meeting. If you have any questions about MusicXML, or any announcements about products adding support for MusicXML, please make use of the Discussions area on GitHub.
MNX
Pull request #281 (for issue #185), for the specification of layouts, has now been merged. Issue #263, concerning the proposal for the infrastructure for styling, is now ready to be formalised into a pull request. After this proposal has been merged into the specification, separate issues to cover the specifics of defining the various styles that can be applied to elements in MNX documents will be added; Adrian proposes adding a single style property to the specification so that there is a fully worked-out example.
Following that work, the next area to be tackled, as previously discussed, will be for dealing with the differences between scores and parts, in particular things like note spelling, as covered by issue #34.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 15 March 2022.
We have decided to enable the Discussions feature on GitHub for the MusicXML repository. This is intended to be a place for questions about MusicXML, but not bug reports in the specification or documentation, or proposals for new features: those should still be raised as issues, as before. Several issues that have been raised recently would actually have been better served as discussions, and so we hope that this will prove to be a useful resource for the developer and user community.
MNX
Adrian has integrated some further changes in pull request #281 for issue #185, addressing feedback from community members to ensure that the examples and the specification match, and renaming a couple of the elements specified. We anticipate the pull request will be merged within the next few days.
The next area of work is going to be producing some examples in support of issue #263 to bring the proposal for styling towards a pull request. We hope that producing some concrete examples of these new properties in action will help other community members assess the overall proposal and give further feedback.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 1 March 2022.
It appears unlikely that we will be able to plan to get together at an in-person event this coming spring. There is still uncertainty over whether events like Musikmesse in Frankfurt and The NAMM Show in Anaheim will occur as currently planned, and it appears that logistically not all of the co-chairs will be able to attend either of these events in any case. Other potential opportunities for an in-person meeting in the spring present similar challenges.
Therefore the co-chairs propose that we will continue to meet online this year. Our last community group meeting was in October, so our current thinking is that we will plan for an online community group meeting in the autumn.
It may be that one or more of the co-chairs is in attendance at either Musikmesse or The NAMM Show, and if so, we will aim to arrange a social gathering for any community group members who are also in attendance.
MNX
Pull request #281 has been prepared by Adrian to bring the staff and system layout changes proposed in issue #185 into the specification. Christina Noel has prepared a set of music examples that demonstrate these new features in action, which you can find here. We are currently gathering feedback on the pull request and certainly welcome further feedback from community members who may not have yet had the opportunity to review the changes. The co-chairs request that any further feedback is submitted on the pull request itself by the end of this coming Friday, 4 February 2022.
Following the merging of this issue, we will turn our attention to the proposal for styling in issue #263. The best way to get familiar with the current state of this proposal is to read Joe Berkovitz’s comment from 3 December 2021.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 15 February 2022.
The updated Group Charter comes into effect today, following the completion of the election on 9 January 2022. The proposed update passed by a margin of 24 votes for to 0 votes against.
The community group wiki will be further updated with a link to the two previous versions of the charter and the election results in due course.
MNX
Adrian has been working on pulling together the changes proposed for issue #185. The current status of this work is that there is a new top-level layouts container element. The next step is to develop a series of examples to demonstrate this element, and these will be coming soon.
The next area of work will be to focus on the proposal for style properties described in issue #263. If you would like to get an overview of this proposal, Joe Berkovitz’s comment here provides a synopsis.
Instrument data
Now that the updated Group Charter is in effect, we can begin the formal work on the instrument data project. Daniel will work on an initial list of requirements as a starting point for discussion and share at the next meeting, all being well.
Next meeting
The next co-chair meeting will be on Tuesday 1 February 2022.
If you have not yet cast your vote for or against the charter update, please go to the Charter Election page on the group wiki to do so. Once you are at the election page:
If you don’t see any Edit options, log in to your W3C account by clicking Log in in the upper right corner of the page. You created a W3C account when joining the Music Notation Community Group.
Click on the “edit” link in the appropriate Votes section to add your Yes or No vote. Please put your name on a separate line in the bulleted list.
If you find you cannot log into your W3C account or have other problems editing the wiki page to cast your vote, you may also cast your vote on the public-music-notation-contrib mailing list. One of the co-chairs will then transfer your vote to the wiki election page.
MNX
Adrian has updated the mnxconverter and its test cases to use the new element names that were decided upon for #265.
Adrian also plans to publish a pull request addressing the proposals for grouping parts described in issue #185 for discussion and approval. If any members want to read a summary of the proposal ahead of the pull request’s publication, they can read this comment from Christina Noel on the issue.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will take place on Tuesday 18 January 2022.
After the publication of the draft of the revised Community Group Charter, we received some proposed amendments from James Ingram, for which the co-chairs are grateful. Michael made some amendments in response to these proposals. The proposed Group Charter can be read here.
The co-chairs now propose that we begin the 30-day election period for the approval of the revised Group Charter this Thursday 9 December 2021. The election will conclude on at 23:00 UTC on Sunday 9 January 2022. The method for voting will be to register your approval or disapproval on a dedicated page on the Community Group Wiki. If for any reason you are unable to sign in to the Wiki but still wish to vote, you can alternatively register your vote via the public-music-notation-contrib mailing list. Michael will send full instructions for how to vote at the beginning of the election period on Thursday 9 December.
MNX
Adrian has completed the migration of the last details of the old specification to the new specification, together with a list of the details that have intentionally not been migrated to the new specification (in the first section of the old specification document, Status of this document). This closes issues #253 and #223.
Issue #265 is also now closed: a number of elements with similar names in different contexts have now been renamed to avoid problems when validating against the W3C XML Schema. The following elements have been renamed:
<directions> (global) is now <directions-global>
<directions> (part) is now <directions-part>
<directions> (sequence) remains <directions>
<measure> (global) is now <measure-global>
<measure> (part) remains <measure>
The MNX converter has yet to be updated to conform to these latest changes, but Adrian plans to do that imminently.
Issue #266 has also been addressed, clarifying that <score> elements can use <layout> elements without requiring any <page> elements, to satisfy use cases where you need to describe a layout but no specific page information is required, for example to produce a single system of unspecified width (like Finale’s Scroll View).
We have now reached consensus on the long-standing issue concerning the grouping of parts (issue #185), and thanks to the work of Christina Noel to summarise the consensus view, Adrian will now prepare a pull request to work this into the specification.
In line with the revised Group Charter, the co-chairs have closed the remaining issues related to the proposed MNX-Generic format, since that is not within the scope of the community group’s work. As a corollary, we have also decided to remove the MNX-Common tag from the GitHub issues, since all open issues in the MNX project relate to what is now known simply as MNX.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 4 January 2022.
Michael has produced a draft of the updated Community Group charter that is now ready for review, which you can read here. If you want to compare the revised version with the current version, you can click here. The revisions extend the scope of the Community Group’s work to include the proposed new musical instrument data project, updating the description of the MNX specification to reflect the current status, updated information about the deliverables produced by the Community Group, and made some smaller edits that reflect the current working practices of the group.
To comment on the revised charter, please send an email to the public-music-notation-contrib mailing list (archives here). We apologise in advance for the higher than usual traffic on this mailing list, but this is a crucial step in the work of the community group, so we ask for your forbearance.
Please make any comments about the proposed revisions via the mailing list by Monday 6 December 2021. We plan to start the 30-day election process to approve the revised charter later that week, with the aim of having the revised charter approved early in January 2022.
MNX
A proposal for uniform style properties for MNX has been put forward by Joe Berkovitz (issue #263) that has generated some excellent feedback, and since this is an area of particular importance it would be great to have more contributions from other group members.
Another issue that has been actively discussed recently concerns re-use of element names in different contexts (issue #265): it appears that this will be not only potentially confusing but will also present serious obstacles for code-generation based on the XML schema. The proposed solution is to rename the elements, and Adrian will put forwards a concrete proposal.
Adrian continues to make progress on the project to audit the old specification document to bring things over to the new specification (issue #253), and to build a list of elements proposed in the original specification that are insufficiently concrete to be moved over as-is, or have been decided not to be done in MNX 1.0. Adrian is close to completing this task now.
Musical instrument data
Michael and Daniel met last week with Jeremy Sawruk and Simon Smith, who have expressed an interest in co-editing the proposed musical instrument data specification that is currently under discussion. The co-chairs would still welcome hearing from anybody who would be interested in taking on any part of the responsibilities for editing this specification, or potentially helping out in ancillary ways such as building software tools to manage and marshall the required data. If you might be interested, please contact Daniel via email.
The project cannot move forwards formally until the charter revision has been approved, but assuming it does so, the plan will be to bring together the co-chairs and the parties interested in playing a role in co-editing the specification together to start drafting a set of use cases that can be discussed by the wider community group and which will eventually form the basis of scoping the new project.
Date of next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on Tuesday 7 December 2021.
w3c/smufl
