Problem with jazz interpretation of chord symbol playback.

• May 22, 2020 - 10:51

The "Jazz" interpretation feature of chord symbol playback changes the literal chord playback by substituting enhanced Jazz chords. However, the problem is that the playback no longer matches the chord symbol display—a possible source for confusion for the user.

A better alternative, IMV, is to maintain the WYSIWYG nature of chord symbols (i.e. playback matches the visual display) and simply to provide an extra feature which allows users to substitute the display of existing chord symbols with their Jazz variants. The "Interpretation" property could then be removed altogether.

Comments

• May 22, 2020 - 13:52

That's not how jazz players work. We literally do see C7 but play C13 or C7b9 or whatever. So typical jazz lead sheets don't show C13 most of the time, they just show C7, and jazz players know they are free to add color tones to fit the situation. The point of the jazz interpretation is to allow this to work as expected in MuseScore's playback - a simple lead continues to look as it should but also sound as it should.

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• Jul 2, 2020 - 10:25

Thanks to Jojo I have been able to try this myself and was eager to learn from the differences of the direct (literal, my UI says wörtlich) transcription and the jazz interpretation. So I gave it a try with the chords of a ballad. I had expected differences in the realized chords as you described above. But the only difference I found was in the duration of measure 21.
duration.JPG
The result seems to be very special.
So, is it me misunderstanding your explanation or is the selected source too simple for a jazzy interpretation?

OS: Windows 10 (10.0), Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore version (64-bit): 3.5.0.12237, revision: b5add95

Edit:
This is what I have done: I have selected all chordsymbols and selected realize from the context menue with fhe following optin (german language installation of Musescore).
realize.JPG

And this is how measure 21 looks in my Musescore window before realizing the chord: measure21.JPG

Attachment Size
You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To.plain_.mscz 21.66 KB

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• Jul 2, 2020 - 17:05

Hmm, I agree I am not seeing the difference I expect when using the Realize Chord Symbols command with the Override option. However, it does seem to work as I expect if I actually set the interpretation to Jazz in the Inspector, rather than use the Override option. Also, the voicing override does seem to work. So, it seems to be a bug in the realize command where that dropdown doesn't get applied for whatever reason.

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