difference between displayed and Played as

• Feb 21, 2009 - 11:02

I would really like to see an option to be able to enter a note, click on it and then click some button that would bring up another staff that has the duration of that note. Notes could then be entered on that staff and saved and closed. Then the original note entered would remain unchanged in appearance, but when playback got to that note, it would actually play back what was written on the "ghost staff" This should make it possible to hear things such as grace notes, trills, turns, etc.--Just write out how they are performed on the ghost staff, then the symbols for these can be added into the score as merely cosmetic items. OR the act of attaching these to a note will trigger the ghost staff to come up for that note, even better!


Comments

I like this idea and i am thinking about how this could be implemented. There could be a global switch "show ornaments" on/off to toggle between two views. An ornament is defined as a group of notes replaced with one note and optional symbols. There are a lot of possible side effects so the implementation would not be trivial. For example the replacement note could not be edited like a normal note which will produce lots of special cases in the code.

In reply to by [DELETED] 3

Some scores have editorial "footnotes" which write out trills and ornaments explicitly. I can probably find some examples of this if you want to see it. Maybe MuseScore could display the written out ornaments as footnotes.

My preference is to get the ornaments to play properly without the user having to write them out. Obviously this would take some thought and experimentation to get right.

In reply to by David Bolton

I think it would certainly be helpful to have some level of default ornament execution, however it would be a loss if it were not customizable. Please take into consideration that the same ornament could be executed dramatically differently depending on such variables as the tempo, what notes come before and after, time period, genre, context, and style. For example take a simple trill: in classical music this should always begin on the upper note, unless the note before it is the same as the upper note then it would usually be started on the lower, but if the piece is modern band music, the trill would always begin on the main note. Then, once having started the trill... how to terminate it?
Questions like these are the reason why the footnotes are often provided.

In reply to by [DELETED] 3

Would it be any easier to have a [replace with...] button in the note properties dialog box that would open up another box and allow you to choose from the selection of notes and dots. This would then replace one of the notes of a written out ornament, say a 32nd note, with another type of note, ie. a half note; all of the other notes of the ornament could then be made invisible. The note would still be a 32nd note as far as the program was concerned but a half note would be displayed instead. somewhat less elegant, but would accomplish many of the same results. What do you think?

Fermatas could be handled in a similar way as the above. This would make it possible, as is often necessary, to insert a cadenza in the music using a similar technique. The only major difference would be that fermatas and cadenzas would obviously take more time than what would be actually on the page.

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