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MusicXML

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Re: MusicXML

#11

Post by adrianh »

Tokkemon wrote: post #8

I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/ It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will…

Hi, I'm the person running the MNX project! Contributions welcome — we're making good progress and the new format is going to be really fantastic.

Re: MusicXML

#12

Post by recursive »

1-6 wrote: post #4

Seems like MusicXML is a great format for ML applications. You need to start somewhere and machine-readable code is important.

If you want to do ML on notation, then maybe. MIDI or PCM audio might be a better place to start if you want to work directly on the music.

Re: MusicXML

#13

Post by zozbot234 »

recursive wrote: post #12
1-6 wrote: post #4

Seems like MusicXML is a great format for ML applications. You need to start somewhere and machine-readable code is important.

If you want to do ML on notation, then maybe. MIDI or PCM audio might be a better place to start if you want to work directly on the music.

Note that MIDI is a lot more effective when it comes to ML/AI, since it's multiple orders of magnitude less data. Daniel D. Johnson's (formerly known as Hexahedria, hired by Google Brain) model biaxial-rnn-music-composition is from 2015, requires very few resources for training or inference, and still delivers compelling, SOTA-or-close results wrt. improvising ("noodling") classical piano. https://github.com/danieldjohnson/biaxial-rnn-music-composit... You may also want to check out user kpister's recent port to Python 3.x and aesara: https://github.com/kpister/biaxial-rnn-music-composition (Hat tip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328593 ).

Music generation from notation is pretty much the MINST toy-scale equivalent for sequence/language learning models, it's surprising that there's so little attention being paid to it despite how easy it to get started with.

Re: MusicXML

#14

Post by odyssey7 »

Tokkemon wrote: post #8

I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/ It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will…

How would you explain the relationship between MNX and SMuFL?

Re: MusicXML

#15

Post by adrianh »

jonathrg wrote: post #7

I have not had much success using MusicXML to switch between different notation programs. Trying to read a score exported from Musescore as MusicXML in Sibelius or vice versa feels worse than switching between Microsoft Office and other ostensibly compatible formats. Does anyone have any success stories?

This is a common complaint, and it's something we're trying to remedy with MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/

Music notation is incredibly complex, and there are many places things can go wrong. There's a wide spectrum of error situations, such as:

* The exporting application "thinks" about notation in a different way than the importing application (i.e., it has a different mental model).

* MusicXML provides multiple ways of encoding the same musical concept, and some applications don't take the effort to check for all possible scenarios.

* Some applications support a certain type of notation while others don't.

* MusicXML doesn't have a semantic way of encoding certain musical concepts (leading applications to encode them as simple text (via the words element), if at all.

* Good ol' fashioned bugs in MusicXML import or export. (Music notation is complex, so it's easy to introduce bugs!)

Re: MusicXML

#16

Post by adrianh »

odyssey7 wrote: post #14
Tokkemon wrote: post #8

I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/ It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will…

How would you explain the relationship between MNX and SMuFL?

They're totally different things, though the standards are maintained by the same people.

SMuFL is a font layout specification. It solves the longtime problem of "I'm making a music font. Which Unicode code glyph should I use for a treble clef?" For many years, this was a Wild West situation, and it wasn't possible to swap music fonts because they defined their glyphs in inconsistent ways. This problem is basically solved now, thanks to SMuFL.

MNX is a way of encoding the music itself. It solves the problem of "I have some music notation I want to encode in a semantic format, so it can be analyzed/displayed/exported/imported/etc."

Re: MusicXML

#17

Post by Kye »

Tokkemon wrote: post #8

I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/ It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will…

How well does MusicXML (and MNX) represent the full range of notation? It seems like an exceptionally hard problem.

Related: Can it handle non-Western notations?

Re: MusicXML

#18

Post by [deleted] »

Tokkemon wrote: post #8

I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/ It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will…

[deleted]

Re: MusicXML

#19

Post by saltminer »

adrianh wrote: post #15
jonathrg wrote: post #7

I have not had much success using MusicXML to switch between different notation programs. Trying to read a score exported from Musescore as MusicXML in Sibelius or vice versa feels worse than switching between Microsoft Office and other ostensibly compatible formats. Does anyone have any success stories?

This is a common complaint, and it's something we're trying to remedy with MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/ Music notation is incredibly complex, and there are many places things can go wrong. There's a wide spectrum of error situations, such as: * The exporting application "thinks" about notation in a different way than the importing application (i.e., it has a different mental model). * MusicXML provides multip…

> MusicXML provides multiple ways of encoding the same musical concept, and some applications don't take the effort to check for all possible scenarios.

This sounded interesting, so I went to the webpage, and found this point specifically called out:

> It prioritizes interchange, meaning: it can be generated unambiguously, it can be parsed unambiguously, it favors one-and-only-one way to express concepts, and multiple programs reading the same MNX file will interpret it the same way.

But I'm curious to see some examples of this. https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/comparisons/musicxml/ provides an interesting comparison (and calls out how the same MusicXML can be interpreted in different ways for things like octave shifts), but it would be nice if the page also included alternate ways that MusicXML can represent the same composition and talk about how certain programs end up misinterpreting/misrepresenting them. The Parts comparison, for instance, mentions how you can represent the same thing in two different ways in MusicXML (score-timewise and score-partwise), but only provides an example for one (score-partwise), and doesn't go into much more detail about if this leads to ambiguity in interpretation or if it's just making things needlessly complex.

Re: MusicXML

#20

Post by gnulinux »

zozbot234 wrote: post #13
recursive wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do ML on notation, then maybe. MIDI or PCM audio might be a better place to start if you want to work directly on the music.

Note that MIDI is a lot more effective when it comes to ML/AI, since it's multiple orders of magnitude less data. Daniel D. Johnson's (formerly known as Hexahedria, hired by Google Brain) model biaxial-rnn-music-composition is from 2015, requires very few resources for training or inference, and still delivers compelling, SOTA-or-close results wrt. improvising ("noodling") classical piano. https://github.com/danieldj…

MIDI is absolutely horrible for ML. It lacks very necessary information such as articulation etc which are important to make sense of music. It's popular because it's simple but there is no way to understand music by just looking at MIDI.

I'm a hobbyist in this space (am a composer myself as well a software engineer) and currently all tools are very poor. MusicXML is better than MIDI. MEI [1] is better than MusicXML etc.

The problem is there is miniscule amount of effort and money spent into this field because music overall makes peanuts. It really doesn't justify training expensive ML algorithms which is unfortunate.

[1] https://music-encoding.org/about/

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