[MEI-L] Thin brackets in orchestral scores

Roland, Perry (pdr4h) pdr4h at eservices.virginia.edu
Wed Dec 11 23:40:52 CET 2013


Hi Zoltan,



Some elements (but not <staffGrp>) already allow @altsym, which contains a pointer to a <symbolDef> element that, in turn, contains instructions on how to "draw" the symbol.  This area of the schema has not been exercised much and could therefore use a lot of work.  However, I think <symbolDef> could be extended to contain SVG, PostScript, etc.



Turning to how this would work with <staffGrp>, the @altsym attribute doesn't actually belong on <staffGrp>.  It's the visual characteristics of <grpSym> we're trying to capture, not those of <staffGrp>.  I believe this is what Andrew's comment was intended to mean.  So, instead of <staffGrp>, <grpSym>, which can be a child of <staffGrp>, should bear @altsym, e.g.,



<staffGrp xml:id="P2" label="Piano" barthru="true">

  <grpSym symbol="brace" altsym="#myBrace"/>

  <staffDef ...

</staffGrp>



Although sometimes it can't be avoided, it's generally bad practice to use attributes to describe other attributes.  The usual way to handle this is to "promote" an attribute to element status and then give it its own attributes.  That's what <grpSym> is doing.



The <grpSym> element, however, still has the @symbol attribute with the same values as when it's used on <staffGrp>.  In effect,



<staffGrp symbol="brace">



is short-hand for



<staffGrp><grpSym symbol="brace"/>.



In other words, as in several places in MEI, it's possible to use attributes for less-detail-oriented encodings (for example, when you don't care what the brace looks like), but use elements when you do.



--

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 [mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de] on behalf of Zoltán Kőmíves [zolaemil at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 5:10 PM
To: Music Encoding Initiative
Subject: Re: [MEI-L] Thin brackets in orchestral scores

Hi Andrew,

The grouping of staves is captured by the staffGrp elements without specifying @symbol. @symbol captures additional information. I talk about this additional content.

Zoltan
________________________________
From: Andrew Hankinson<mailto:andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca>
Sent: ‎2013.‎12.‎11. 20:45
To: Music Encoding Initiative<mailto:mei-l at lists.uni-paderborn.de>
Subject: Re: [MEI-L] Thin brackets in orchestral scores

The intellectual content (“logical domain”) is the groups of staves, not the symbol.

On Dec 11, 2013, at 2:06 PM, Kőmíves Zoltán <zolaemil at gmail.com<mailto:zolaemil at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hello,

Would you mind to read my crazy thoughts about this issue? I'm just curious what you people think of my thinking.

I think the "intellectual content" in this case isn't so much how the connecting symbols look, but the fact that the symbols are *different*.

The current values of @symbol already bear some sort of graphical information, I think. The problem arose now, because it seems that the current set of values don't provide a *complete" classification (that is, in some cases there's no value which describes the symbol's graphical shape appropriately). But of course, it's impossible to provide a complete classification without degrading the markup to SVG.

If we accept that the intellectual content is the *difference* between the connecting symbols, then the proper separation of the "intellectual content" from it's graphical representation would be to use a set of values something like this:

"symbol1",
"symbol2",
"symbol3",
etc.

If one wanted to capture more info about their "look and feel", one could use some pointing mechanism to point to a different element that records the graphical info (possibly even pointing to an external SVG...)

I know, it's a crazy abstraction. And it may be way too abstract compared to its practical use, and we could be better off adding a handful of carefully defined values.

Zoltan





2013/12/11 Laurent Pugin <laurent at music.mcgill.ca<mailto:laurent at music.mcgill.ca>>
It seems to me that adding "bracketsq" as a possible value would be an appropriate addition. I don't think this particular case should necessary open up a discussion on what is just typesetting or not.

Laurent


On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Roland, Perry (pdr4h) <pdr4h at eservices.virginia.edu<mailto:pdr4h at eservices.virginia.edu>> wrote:
Yes, caution is advised.


--
p.


__________________________
Perry Roland
Music Library
University of Virginia
P. O. Box 400175
Charlottesville, VA 22904
434-982-2702<tel:434-982-2702> (w)
pdr4h (at) virginia (dot) edu
________________________________________
From: mei-l [mei-l-bounces+pdr4h=virginia.edu at lists.uni-paderborn.de<mailto:virginia.edu at lists.uni-paderborn.de>] on behalf of Johannes Kepper [kepper at edirom.de<mailto:kepper at edirom.de>]
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 10:02 AM

To: Music Encoding Initiative
Subject: Re: [MEI-L] Thin brackets in orchestral scores

While there is certainly no harm in adding a well-defined set of additional attribute values, the risk I see is that the distinction between these values gets harder every time, eventually watering down their expressiveness in terms of interchange. I'm not saying we're reaching that point here, I'm just saying that we should be careful…



Am 11.12.2013 um 15:58 schrieb Roland, Perry (pdr4h) <pdr4h at eservices.virginia.edu<mailto:pdr4h at eservices.virginia.edu>>:

> The "land of music typesetting" is always nearby, not unlike a 4th dimension hovering around us and within us.  :-)   Intellectual content and presentation are always difficult to separate.  But try we must.
>
> There are already issues in the tracker related to @symbol -- nos. 180 & 182.
>
> From issue #180 -- "The top and bottom components of a bracket can be rendered as curved (similar to Unicode #x1D115) or straight (similar to Unicode #x0005B). The simplest method of dealing with this distinction is to add "bracketsq" (bracket square) to the values allowed by @symbol.  "bracket" will continue to be used for the usual, curved musical bracket. The documentation should be edited to make the distinction clear."
>
> I won't attempt to reproduce #182 here, but it covers the selection of a value for @symbol that captures a line (often fairly wide) used to group systems instead of a brace or bracket.  There's an image in #182 that illustrates various grouping symbols.
>
> Neither the so-called square bracket nor the wide-line-grouping-symbol can be encoded using @symbol="line" since that value is already reserved for the line connecting the staves at their left edge.  I'm partial to the value "rule", but I'm open to suggestions.
>
> I see no harm in adding generic values like this to MEI because they are what I like to call "rendering hints" for the intellectual content -- in this case the staff group.  But obviously this mechanism is not optimal for capturing all the visual details of the symbol, such as line width, color, position, etc.  I am somewhat trepidatious about going too far down that road, at the end of which MEI becomes a re-definition of SVG.  :-)
>
> Yes, there are still things to add to MEI.  And, yes, this is an opportunity to do so.  Now, if there were only more hours in the day ...
>
> --
> p.
>
> __________________________
> Perry Roland
> Music Library
> University of Virginia
> P. O. Box 400175
> Charlottesville, VA 22904
> 434-982-2702<tel:434-982-2702> (w)
> pdr4h (at) virginia (dot) edu
> ________________________________________
> From: mei-l [mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de<mailto:mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de>] on behalf of Johannes Kepper [kepper at edirom.de<mailto:kepper at edirom.de>]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 8:47 AM
> To: Music Encoding Initiative
> Subject: Re: [MEI-L] Thin brackets in orchestral scores
>
> The reason why I feel slightly uneasy with this all is that it seems that we seem to enter the land of a music typesetting program here. In my ignorance about such details, I would probably encode that as a line, and ignore the fact that it is connected on both ends. In manuscripts, there would probably be no difference between this and either brackets or lines. But maybe you're right, and we should include the additional value. @Perry, do I remember correctly that you spotted some values in MusicXML not currently supported by MEI anyway? Is this an opportunity to revise them?
>
> jo
>
>
>
> Am 11.12.2013 um 14:39 schrieb Laurent Pugin <laurent at music.mcgill.ca<mailto:laurent at music.mcgill.ca>>:
>
>> You are right, I think it is missing.
>>
>> There are actually a few of them in the examples, at least there is this one (however with no representation in the encoding)
>> http://www.music-encoding.org/sampleCollection/encodings/Berlioz_Symphony_op25.pdf
>>
>> Laurent
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:21 PM, TW <zupftom at googlemail.com<mailto:zupftom at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>> Laurent's post made me wonder whether we might be missing an
>> additional value for staffGrp/@symbol for the thin bracket that is
>> used for sub-groups in orchestral scores[1].  Looking at some PDFs in
>> the sample collection I didn't see anything like that (I didn't look
>> through all of them).
>>
>> Thomas
>>
>>
>> [1] see e.g. http://notengrafik.com/pdf/examples/Tchaikovsky.pdf
>>
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