[MEI-L] Encoding staff positions

[Roland, Perry (pdr4h)]

Hi Andrew,

You're absolutely right that <staff> attempts to capture the logical nature rather than the physical nature of staves.  <sb/> is of secondary importance in this approach.

However, Laurent and I have had several conversations about creating a page-oriented version of MEI.  I think this would address your needs as one of the major features of this approach would be a <system> element.  In other words, in this approach the physical layout would be primary.



I think turning the current schema "inside-outside" would be a good place to start; that is, the things that are empty now, such as <lb/> and <sb/> will end up being containers and some current container elements will end up being empty.  I think your suggestions a're definitely on the right track, but I'm reluctant to intermingle the logical-is-primary approach with the physical-is-primary method.  So, I think the choice will have to be mutually exclusive, implemented by switching on a page-oriented module.  The big question is, How many of the existing elements will have to make the empty <--> container switch?



Is this something we can take up after the next release in May?



--

p.

__________________________
Perry Roland
Music Library
University of Virginia
P. O. Box 400175
Charlottesville, VA 22904
434-982-2702 (w)
pdr4h (at) virginia (dot) edu
________________________________________
From: mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de [mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de] On Behalf Of Andrew Hankinson, Mr [andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca]
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 1:51 PM
To: Music Encoding Initiative
Subject: [MEI-L] Encoding staff positions

I'm currently trying to work out a method of encoding staff system positions on a page using MEI.

Let's assume that there is a single page of unmeasured music, with four systems on the page and I want to create a <zone> element for each system describing its layout.

Currently, the <staff> element seems to indicate a continuous line of music independent of its layout in systems, with the empty <sb /> element used to indicate a break in the system layout. This empty element has an @facs attribute, but I would be hesitant to encode spatial information with an empty element.

Before I go any further, can anyone think of something I'm missing? Any possible solutions?

If not, I can see two options.

The first is to create an element that is similar to the <span> element (call it "<mspan>"). This element would be a non-wrapping element that is generic and simply supplies a method of wrapping arbitrary information. This would be modelled after the use in the hOCR specification -- you can see an example here: http://code.google.com/p/hocr-tools/source/browse/sample.html

Thus, you might have:

<staff>
  <mspan facs="123">
        .... system 1 ....
  </mspan>
  <sb />
  <mspan facs="456">
        .... system 2 ....
  </mspan>
  <sb />
</staff>

While the <mspan> element would be a pretty powerful addition, its semantic value is minimal. Thus, the other option might be to introduce an explicit <system> element that would be a child of the <staff> and function as an explicit wrapper for a system, in place of the empty <sb /> element; thus

<staff>
  <system n="1" facs="123">
    .... system 1 ....
  </system>
  <system n="2" facs="456">
    .... system 2 ....
  </system>
</staff>

Any ideas? Thoughts?

-Andrew



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