[MEI-L] [fill up time to complete layers in] cross-staff beams sample encoding

[Byrd, Donald A.]

I'm concerned about issue #3 below. In much idiomatic piano music from Chopin and Schumann on, if not earlier, I don't think it makes sense to try to complete voices by encoding anything to fill the space between notes (or explicit rests). Voices disappear and reappear anywhere, sometimes several times in one measure! We humans deduce the timing by finding notes in other voices the offending notes align with. That's just the "sameas" idea.

There's a measure in a Chopin Ballade in which one voice disappears and reappears five times; see my Extremes of Conventional Music Notation (http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/donbyrd/CMNExtremes.htm). (Okay, it's just isolated second stems on notes, so arguably not a "real" voice, but that doesn't help!) Filling in that voice would make the encoding pretty messy, and I'd say would make it harder -- not easier -- to see what's really going on.

Disclaimer: I realize my objection isn't applicable to a lot of music, but I can't find Zoltán's example in http://music-encoding.org/documentation, either in Sample Encodings or via MEI Search, so I can't easily see if my objection applies to it. Where is "the cross-staff beam sample encoding??

--Don


On Mar 26, 2015, at 6:23 AM, Kőmíves Zoltán <zolaemil at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Looking at the cross-staff beam sample encoding, a number of things occur to me:
> 
> 1. note with xml:id="m1e1" encoded a dotted 8th note, but I found this more than a little confusing: the information that there is a triplet containing one 16th-rest and two 16th-note seems to have been lost. Additionally, the sum of the total duration in the layer adds up to more than the measure duration defined by the time signature.
> 
> 2. note with xml:id="m1s1l2e1" encoded in the wrong octave (it should be e4, not e3).
> 
> 3. The first note on staff 2/layer 1 is the dotted g, which is rhythmically at the 2nd 16th triplet position. I understand that this can be derived from the fact that this note is "sameas" the 2nd note of the displaced triplet on the first staff, but it strikes me that this leaves the layer "incomplete"; I would expect a <space> to fill up the time before the first note; I think the following encoding would clearer:
> Or do you think this is already too interpretative (interpreting the dotted 8th note as part of a sixtuplet over the entire measure, that is)?
> 
>                             <staff n="1">
>                                 <layer n="1">
>                                     <tuplet bracket.visible="true" bracket.place="above" num="3"
>                                         num.visible="true" num.place="above">
>                                         <rest dur="16" xml:id="m1r1" staff="2"/>
>                                         <beam>
>                                             <note pname="g" oct="3" dur="16" stem.dir="up"
>                                                 stem.pos="right" xml:id="m1e1" staff="2"/>
>                                             <note pname="c" oct="4" dur="16" stem.dir="up" staff="1"
>                                                 xml:id="m1e2"/>
>                                         </beam>
>                                     </tuplet>
>                                     <tuplet num="3" num.visible="true" num.place="above"
>                                         bracket.visible="true" bracket.place="above">
>                                         <beam>
>                                             <note pname="g" oct="4" dur="8" stem.dir="up" staff="1"
>                                                 xml:id="m1e3"/>
>                                             <note pname="a" oct="4" dur="16" stem.dir="up" staff="1"
>                                                 xml:id="m1e4"/>
>                                         </beam>
>                                     </tuplet>
>                                 </layer>
>                                 <layer n="2">
>                                     <space dur="8"/>
>                                     <tuplet>
>                                         <note pname="e" oct="3" dur="16" stem.dir="down"
>                                             xml:id="m1s1l2e1"/>
>                                         <note pname="c" oct="4" dur="16" stem.dir="down"
>                                             xml:id="m1s1l2e2"/>
>                                         <note pname="a" oct="3" dur="16" stem.dir="up"
>                                             stem.pos="right" xml:id="m1s1l2e3" staff="2"/>
>                                     </tuplet>
>                                 </layer>
>                             </staff>
>                             <staff n="2">
>                                 <layer n="1">
>                                     <tuplet bracket.visible="false" dur.visible="false" num.visible="false" dur="2">
>                                         <space dur="16"/>
>                                         <beam>
>                                             <note pname="g" dots="1" sameas="#m1e1" dur="8"
>                                                 stem.pos="left" stem.dir="down"/>
>                                             <space dur="16"/>
>                                             <note pname="a" sameas="#m1s1l2e3" stem.dir="down" dur="16"
>                                                 stem.pos="left"/>
>                                         </beam>
>                                     </tuplet>
>                                 </layer>
>                                 <layer n="2">
>                                     <tuplet num="3" bracket.visible="true" bracket.place="below"
>                                         num.place="below" numbase="2">
>                                         <beam>
>                                             <note pname="c" oct="2" dur="16" stem.dir="down"
>                                                 xml:id="m1s2l2e1"/>
>                                             <note pname="g" oct="2" dur="16" stem.dir="down"
>                                                 xml:id="m1s2l2e2"/>
>                                             <note pname="e" oct="3" dur="16" stem.dir="down"
>                                                 xml:id="m1s2l2e3"/>
>                                         </beam>
>                                         <rest dur="8" xml:id="m1s2l2e4" loc="0"/>
>                                     </tuplet>
>                                 </layer>
>                             </staff>
> 
> 
> Best
> Zoltan
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---
Donald Byrd
Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellow
Adjunct Associate Professor of Informatics
Visiting Scientist, Research Technologies
Indiana University Bloomington