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MusicXML

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Re: MusicXML

#51

Post by Tokkemon »

Kye wrote: post #17
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?

MusicXML only works with conventional western notation, but MNX is attempting to expand that significantly. How far they will get with that, I don't know.

Re: MusicXML

#52

Post by Rochus »

Anyone remembering IEEE 1599? Seems to share a lot of goals.

And there are actually a lot of alternatives, e.g. ABC notation, Alda, Music Macro Language, LilyPond, to name a few. Difficult to decide which one to prefer.

Re: MusicXML

#53

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

microtherion wrote: post #40
usrusr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for JSON-with-comments, and I even have a bit of a soft spot for the idea of JSON-with-expressions, but considering how far I expect this one to be on the "interchange" side of the spectrum between interchange formats and authoring formats, I doubt that comments will be missed a lot. Certainly less, less by several orders of magnitude, than in the depressingly ubiquitous JSON-as-configuration use case...

Another concern with comments is that apps might try to (ab)use them to store app specific information, which hurts the goal of an interchange format.

"Oh no! Bad actors might abuse this absolutely necessary feature, so it's better that we leave it out and let everyone suffer to avoid that! You'll just have to cope!"

Re: MusicXML

#54

Post by adrianh »

ronyeh wrote: post #36
adrianh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Awesome project (as always) Adrian! Will MNX allow for inline comments? I don’t see any comments on the examples page: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/mnx-reference/examples/ I know JSON doesn’t have comments, but JS and JSON5 allow for comments. It would be super nice to allow for comments because you can hand annotate sections of the MNX file for the purposes of teaching.

Thanks! We're not planning to support inline comments at this time; this was a tradeoff we knew we'd have to make when we decided to use JSON.

Given the choice between supporting comments and supporting a wider variety of implementations/libraries ("plain" JSON as opposed to a comments-supporting variant), I think the latter is a more practical priority.

With that said, we'd like to add a standard way to add vendor-specific information to an MNX document — which is definitely a must-have, for applications that will use MNX as a native format — and I could see a comments-ish thing appearing in that form.

Regarding that examples page, I'm actually planning to do something along those lines anyway. The MusicXML docs and the MNX docs use the same system (a Django app), and the MusicXML part uses a custom XML tag to define "this part of the XML example should be highlighted in blue" (example: https://w3c.github.io/musicxml/musicxml-reference/examples/a...). It's on my to-do list to implement the same thing for the JSON version — which is essentially like inline comments(ish), if you squint.

Re: MusicXML

#55

Post by antoinebalaine »

adrianh wrote: post #11
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.

Looking forward to discovering this standard. After 2 years working on parsing ABC, I realize how difficult it is to represent notation. Kudos on this effort!

Re: MusicXML

#56

Post by Exoristos »

feoren wrote: post #48
Exoristos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XML is much more precise and much more flexible. It also benefits from much more powerful and mature tooling. The few comparative downsides it has include verboseness, which doesn't matter to machines, and that younger devs don't know how to work with it, which again shouldn't be much of an issue in this use case.

XML is less precise, because it's more flexible. Powerful and mature tooling only matters to people creating and editing XML, not computers. XML Schemas are there to support human editors, not computers. Verboseness means larger files and longer processing times, which does matter to computers; the verbosity is explicitly and only there for human readers and editors. JSON is a much better format for something humans…

You're wrong in almost every point. Flexible definition of data allows for greater precision of data structure. Something like XSLT isn't for human interaction; it's for super-powerful machine transformations. I'll grant XML files are larger, but not enough to make much difference when opening a music notation file. Any time a dev pushes back against XML, it's been my experience they are uneducated on the subject.

Re: MusicXML

#57

Post by [deleted] »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #49
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #3

MusicXML is old hat. All the cool kids are using MusicJSON now. EDIT: I'd like to clarify that I posted this comment, as a joke , before the below comment went on to clarify that there was, in fact, a JSON-based rewrite of the music standard in progress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460827 Never change, tech world!

Please don't post one-line jokes on HN. The longstanding culture of this venue finds that inappropriate.

[deleted]

Re: MusicXML

#58

Post by account-5 »

jefftk wrote: post #41
account-5 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of either before but having looked at the comparison [0] I think I prefer the XML version. [0] https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/comparisons/musicxml/

What do you like better about the XML version?

It's computer readable and (with highlighting) human readable. The JSON brackets are visually jarring. I feel that the XML is almost self documenting whereas I'd probably need the schema to understand the JSON.

I like JSON for data transfer but for describing documents XML is decent.

Re: MusicXML

#60

Post by gnulinux »

zozbot234 wrote: post #46
gnulinux wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm familiar and... > Here's a taste of things to come it sounds like randomly generated MIDI... Doesn't sound like anything to me at all. Music is very subjective but I've so far seen no model that's convincing. If you like it that's cool I suppose. I personally use algorithmic composing plenty in my own compositions (I write music for piano) and these kind of models don't do it for me. They're definitely tools,…

Well yes, this model like others is quite far from giving you a finished piece. But if it's giving you "a sense" of possibly useful ideas, that's enough to make it more than "random". (Besides, I'm not sure that we would even want AI to produce music on its own with zero human input - what would be the point of that? So "just noodling around, giving you some ideas to get started with" is quite good as far as it goes.…

My point is that -- in my experience and musical taste -- deterministic algorithms (e.g. literal scripts you write yourself to generate MusicXML, MIDI, lilypond, PDF etc) are orders of magnitude more useful than these neural network ML models that give you monolithic chunks of music. You can still use NN models in your scripts (e.g. have a model to determine chord distance, tonality etc) but there is no universal musical model that has come remotely close to convincing me so far. Of course, when it comes to Western classical music, "counterpoint" is probably the closest you can get to a universal musical model that you'll attempt to find in all pieces of music, but even that comes nowhere near even remotely close to explaining great majority of musical statements (even in something as contrapuntal as Bach). Especially when we come to 20th and 21st century music when people actively react to this model.
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