Note names in note heads

• Jan 13, 2016 - 15:39

I am looking at implementing the ability to easily put note names within the note heads. Bravura provides special note head glyphs for this purposes, so I tried implementing a new "Head group" called "Letter" that you select like any other in the Inspector, and it automatically puts in the correct head according to the pitch.

It works nicely except that the note heads are transparent: you can see the staff line through the "empty" spaces, which makes it hard to read the text:

transparent-note.png

Published examples I see normally have the empty spaces within the notehead opaque, so the staff lines don't show through. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to make a glyph do this. Can you force an oval like the half note head to display as opaque, so the staff lines do not show through the empty space? If not, I'd need to investigate other methods of implementing this.

BTW, it would also be possible to add a staff or score style option to default to these heads rather than requiring you to select all notes and set them to Letter when you are done. But it seems it would be nice to have the Inspector method as well, to allow head styles to be mixed.

Comments

• Jan 13, 2016 - 16:49

I see two different problems here.

1/ The opacity of the notehead. I'm afraid we will have to draw a background just like it's done for tablature. See Note::draw(). A rectangle will cause issues with overlapping notes, like seconds... Maybe we could draw an ellipse..

2/ The implementation of this new head group. If I understand correctly, selecting this group will automatically change the notehead for the right pitch. What if we use the do, re, mi noteheads with movable do, or without? Also, it seems that it will deviate quite drastically from the other notehead groups implementation?
A alternative solution would be to let the user choose DO head group, C head group etc... and add a staff type style to implement the automatic behavior and there add options for movable do, do vs C and maybe more.

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• Jan 13, 2016 - 16:58

I actually was implementing both a "letter" and "name" group, the latter would use do re mi, but in "fixed" configuration. The implementation is not complicated. But yes, just listing each note head indivudally would be simpler to implement and more flexible, at the expense of being more work for the user, unless we also added the staff property to do this automatically. That's not a bad idea.

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• Jan 14, 2016 - 15:17

This type of notation is common in instructional books for children, for imstance. Even if the practice is somewhat controversial, there is no denyng some teachers like using this style of notation. I've recently started focusing more on features that I think will be valued by educators, and this and the annotation feature I proposed elsewhere are examples of that.

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• Jan 15, 2016 - 20:50

Yes, and that is very well done and quite nice to have, but I think this should be built-in. The downside of the plugin is that it needs to be run after the piece is completed and the noteheads are really just text attached to the notes, not actually noteheads, and hence won't update if the note changes. Not only won't the text update, but the position won't update either.

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