6 ms·

MusicXML and Percussion Notation

84 points by pcr910303 5y ago

specialist 5y ago
Gah. Data translation, between almost matching schemas (ontologies), has been 1/2 of my professional career. Probably. I don't know if this applies: S-notation for turntablism (DJing) represents pitch. But I couldn't quickly find any XML schemas for S-notation.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > S-notation for turntablism (DJing) represents pitch. But I couldn't quickly find any XML schemas for S-notation. As a lisp hacker and musician, I quickly got confused what you meant and first read "S-expressions"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression). For others (as HN has quite a few people with the same profile as me), S-notation here refers to "transcription method which uses an own repertoire of notational symbols to describe the techniques of a turntablist", see http://www.alexandersonnenfeld.com/fileadmin/user_upload/S-Notation/S-Notation-Paper_Tenor_2016.pdf http://www.alexandersonnenfeld.com/fileadmin/user_upload/S-N...
  - specialist 5y ago
    Gah. You're right. I should have provided cites. Thanks.
- chriskrycho 5y ago
  The worst part about it is: same schema/ontology, but different (legitimate!) choices within it! Cue sobbing emoji.
encryptluks2 5y ago
I usually find XML to be too verbose. I would love to see more music notation markup formats.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  I guess the difficult part is development of the actual music/audio software and layout into sheet music/conventional notation, with the representation format only a secondary concern. No idea if MusicXML is widely used, but I'd imagine as long as it does its job of exchanging scores across apps, nobody will be too enthusiastic to reinvent new ones all the time just because. However, you might find of interest that Charles Goldfarb, the father of SGML (and thus HTML and XML), also being a Jazz musician and lawyer, authored SMDL [1], a format that would later generalize to HyTime. Though knowing just a bit of HyTime, I think you'll be thoroughly disappointed when looking for non-verboseness ;), HyTime describing everything in markup (SGML/XML) and being regarded so impossibly complex a multimedia description format that only a single, and necessarily incomplete implementation was ever started (by Fujitsu). Parts of HyTime are fascinating, though. Among other things, it generalizes the concept of a hyperlink into having a time dimension. [1]: http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/hthist.htm http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/hthist.htm
  - chriskrycho 5y ago
    MusicXML is indeed widely used, and it is basically the standard interchange format for music notation apps. Every major app I can think of supports it—certainly the “big four” of Dorico, Sibelius, Finale, and MuseScore, as well as other apps like Notion, StaffPad, etc. I was thinking of what would make the interchange format better would be after writing up this post, and my honest conclusion was that MusicXML itself is pretty good. There are standardization choices you could make within the format itself (as alluded to in the post) which would help with interchange, but the definition is reasonable throughout. The thing that is hard is simply that XML is hard: lots of tools out there support subsets of it, but nearly everything XML-oriented ends up being either Java or some kind of libxml wrapper. (To my surprise, there really isn’t a ton even in the Rust space which would seem to be well-suited to this kind of thing. DTD support took ages to show up anywhere, for example.) While switching to some kind of JSON schema would mitigate the XML problem, getting all the vendors to adopt it would be quite a battle, I expect.
    - tannhaeuser 5y ago
jacquesm 5y ago
I've looked at MusicXML as an intermediary format to convert to from MIDI but found it to be overly complex and ended up just using the MIDI data in JSON form directly. This worked well except of course for the fact that MIDI is quite lossy (rests aren't in there, slurs are implicit, there are no 'beat' markers and so on). Music formats are tricky, some are more suitable for performance, some more for archival storage or composition. It's enough to drive you bonkers at times, especially if you want exact representation and slowly you realize you are just not going to get it perfect no matter how hard you try.
- jraph 5y ago
  > I've looked at MusicXML as an intermediary format to convert to from MIDI To do what? I'm curious.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    To power pianojacq.com In essence it allows you to upload a two-handed midi file (or a single track if you trust the splitter ;) ), and then to use the UI to practice the piece. It's slowly building up a following of people that use it for daily practice, and I've built up a small repertoire of suitable files (basically at the speed that I practice the pieces myself).
    - jraph 5y ago
      This looks really good. I happen to be learning piano since October and I have a MIDI keyboard. At a first glance, it matches an idea I had. Thanks for building this and for sharing. I might adopt this. And I fully understand why you wanted to use MusicXML now. It makes me think about the feature in MuseScore that plays the score. (Frère Jacques as a default, nice touch)
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        > Frère Jacques as a default, nice touch Out of I don't know how many users you're the first one that spotted that :) Enjoy, if something doesn't work as it should or if I can help out with fixing midi files jam@modularcompany.com

84 points by pcr910303 5y ago

Gah. Data translation, between almost matching schemas (ontologies), has been 1/2 of my professional career. Probably. I don't know if this applies: S-notation for turntablism (DJing) represents pitch. But I couldn't quickly find any XML schemas for S-notation.

capableweb 5y ago
> S-notation for turntablism (DJing) represents pitch. But I couldn't quickly find any XML schemas for S-notation. As a lisp hacker and musician, I quickly got confused what you meant and first read "S-expressions"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression). For others (as HN has quite a few people with the same profile as me), S-notation here refers to "transcription method which uses an own repertoire of notational symbols to describe the techniques of a turntablist", see http://www.alexandersonnenfeld.com/fileadmin/user_upload/S-Notation/S-Notation-Paper_Tenor_2016.pdf http://www.alexandersonnenfeld.com/fileadmin/user_upload/S-N...
- specialist 5y ago
  Gah. You're right. I should have provided cites. Thanks.
chriskrycho 5y ago
The worst part about it is: same schema/ontology, but different (legitimate!) choices within it! Cue sobbing emoji.

encryptluks2 5y ago

I usually find XML to be too verbose. I would love to see more music notation markup formats.

tannhaeuser 5y ago
I guess the difficult part is development of the actual music/audio software and layout into sheet music/conventional notation, with the representation format only a secondary concern. No idea if MusicXML is widely used, but I'd imagine as long as it does its job of exchanging scores across apps, nobody will be too enthusiastic to reinvent new ones all the time just because. However, you might find of interest that Charles Goldfarb, the father of SGML (and thus HTML and XML), also being a Jazz musician and lawyer, authored SMDL [1], a format that would later generalize to HyTime. Though knowing just a bit of HyTime, I think you'll be thoroughly disappointed when looking for non-verboseness ;), HyTime describing everything in markup (SGML/XML) and being regarded so impossibly complex a multimedia description format that only a single, and necessarily incomplete implementation was ever started (by Fujitsu). Parts of HyTime are fascinating, though. Among other things, it generalizes the concept of a hyperlink into having a time dimension. [1]: http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/hthist.htm http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/hthist.htm
- chriskrycho 5y ago
  MusicXML is indeed widely used, and it is basically the standard interchange format for music notation apps. Every major app I can think of supports it—certainly the “big four” of Dorico, Sibelius, Finale, and MuseScore, as well as other apps like Notion, StaffPad, etc. I was thinking of what would make the interchange format better would be after writing up this post, and my honest conclusion was that MusicXML itself is pretty good. There are standardization choices you could make within the format itself (as alluded to in the post) which would help with interchange, but the definition is reasonable throughout. The thing that is hard is simply that XML is hard: lots of tools out there support subsets of it, but nearly everything XML-oriented ends up being either Java or some kind of libxml wrapper. (To my surprise, there really isn’t a ton even in the Rust space which would seem to be well-suited to this kind of thing. DTD support took ages to show up anywhere, for example.) While switching to some kind of JSON schema would mitigate the XML problem, getting all the vendors to adopt it would be quite a battle, I expect.
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago

I've looked at MusicXML as an intermediary format to convert to from MIDI but found it to be overly complex and ended up just using the MIDI data in JSON form directly. This worked well except of course for the fact that MIDI is quite lossy (rests aren't in there, slurs are implicit, there are no 'beat' markers and so on). Music formats are tricky, some are more suitable for performance, some more for archival storage or composition. It's enough to drive you bonkers at times, especially if you want exact representation and slowly you realize you are just not going to get it perfect no matter how hard you try.

jraph 5y ago
> I've looked at MusicXML as an intermediary format to convert to from MIDI To do what? I'm curious.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  To power pianojacq.com In essence it allows you to upload a two-handed midi file (or a single track if you trust the splitter ;) ), and then to use the UI to practice the piece. It's slowly building up a following of people that use it for daily practice, and I've built up a small repertoire of suitable files (basically at the speed that I practice the pieces myself).
  - jraph 5y ago
    This looks really good. I happen to be learning piano since October and I have a MIDI keyboard. At a first glance, it matches an idea I had. Thanks for building this and for sharing. I might adopt this. And I fully understand why you wanted to use MusicXML now. It makes me think about the feature in MuseScore that plays the score. (Frère Jacques as a default, nice touch)
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      > Frère Jacques as a default, nice touch Out of I don't know how many users you're the first one that spotted that :) Enjoy, if something doesn't work as it should or if I can help out with fixing midi files jam@modularcompany.com