SMuFL: Standard Music Font Layout | Hacker News Reader

SMuFL: Standard Music Font Layout

smufl.org

Something I never understood: music notation is a text based notation system, well established with hundreds of years of standardization. We can't I render sheet music the way I render text in the browser? I mean with support for copy/paste/etc. MusicXML was a great step, but I still need non-standard, non-open browser plugins for some reason.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a text-based notation system"? It can be represented as text (MusicXML, "ABC File" and LilyPond source come to mind), but actual engraved music is its own format, and not any more textual than an SVG drawing is.

Music notation is excruciatingly complex, especially when it comes to edge cases and more esoteric notations, and the artistic intents of the engravers. It's not just about "copy these notes from here to there" there's actually a ton of other aesthetic information that should be captured as well, that both makes the score more readable, and informs the performers about how to play the music.

Asking to cut & paste sections of music is basically like asking to support cut & paste for sub-fragments of SVG objects. It's "possible" but both technically difficult to implement, and of questionable utility.

To get a feel for even some "regular" cases of complex music notation take a look at the LilyPond snippet repository here: http://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Browse or even at the LilyPond documentation itself: http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/pitches

MusicXML has been transfered to the W3C in July 2015 and there is now a music notation community group: https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/

So it's becoming a standard.

As their new year message (https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/2015/12/10/2015-... ) says: "we look forward ... to start more extensive work on an updated web music notation format for the future."

It seems this really is just yet another notation standard proposal oriented towards western european music, and from the strictly pre-modern era to boot.

So if you are soundly entrenched in the european art idiom of 1750-1900, this proposal must sound great, along with all the other countless standards and proposals oriented around this exceptionally narrow and historically nearly irrelevant slice of music history.

Other than the extremely avante garde New Music and some traditional micro tonal music (Indian Classical comes to mind), I'm not sure why you think this doesn't work for almost all music from ~1400 to the present day.

Even early choral scores, (~1200-1600) can be typeset by LilyPond using SMuFL compatible fonts in their traditional styles. (For examples, see the "Ancient Music" section of the documentation http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/ancient...)

Prior to that, there's not much written music, and that which is written is done so in a form so specific or esoteric that it will needs to be re-engraved into the traditional staff form for performance by modern day musicians.

There are some local variations that SMuFL doesn't really "handle" per-say, take Jianpu notation as one example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_musical_notation) but those forms can typically be handled well by a standard text editing program.

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