Improper Chord Notation

• Jun 26, 2019 - 20:29

I think I've found a minor bug/issue with the program in regards to chord notation. When I put input a visible voice and an invisible voice on the same staff, I sometimes get overlapped notes instead of the "shifted" notes that you would get from proper chord notation. A sample file with this issue and a screenshot of the file have been included below for reviewing. I'm not sure what the cause of the issue is, but it seems that when I add an invisible voice to a visible voice in the same staff, both voices present the note overlap. This issue does not seem to affect the rest of the program (doesn't crash it, etc.). Thanks for reading and I hope you can help resolve the issue!

Edit: I am using a 2016 MacBook Pro using macOS Mojave, Version 10.14.4 (if this information helps)


Comments

I'm not totally sure what you are trying to do here, but I think what is happening is, when you have mutiple notes of the same pitch, one is normally offset, unless one is invisible, and in that case both notes revert to the "default" position, but this "default" doesn't consider other notes properly. Can you explain more about how this came up? Something about tremolo I gather but I'm not understanding.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Sorry for being unclear. I don't believe the tremolo is causing this (I should have removed that from the sample). However, chords are usually notated in a specific way for ease of reading; notice that on the "correct" example on the right, the G is to the left of the A, which prevents the overlap as seen on the "incorrect" example on the left. The overlap occurs when I add a second voice to the existing chord, which somehow alters the existing voice notation (specifically in this example, I added a second voice with the same pitch and note duration that is invisible; I'm not sure if these are part of the problem but I can test them out later). I suspect that the program tries to rearrange the voices to make room for additional voices (such as rearranging stem orientation for div.) but accidentally overlaps certain notes that shouldn't be overlapping. I hope this clears up the issue and its potential cause(s).

In reply to by Quinn Ouyang

No, I think get the issue, what I don't understand is why you are doing this in the first place - it seems extraordinarily strange. Why have two notes of the same pitch and make one invisible? What purpose does this serve? Knowing why you are doing this will help us understand if it's something anyone else is ever likely to run into or not (most likely things have been this way for five years and I think you're the first to notice).

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I use one voice to notate a tremolo on a string part which has a default playback of a 32nd note pattern (equivalent playback of repeated 32nd notes). This playback is not desirable as I have a tremolo SoundFont from Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra, so I mute the visible voice and notate another invisible voice without the tremolo so the custom audio can playback properly (If I put the custom audio on the tremolo-notated voice, the playback will articulate that as 32nd notes, which is also not desirable). I retested the issue and it looks like both voices must have at least one of the same pair of adjacent notes (side-by-side like that shown in the example) but with one voice made invisible (the tremolo is not the cause and some variations of chords do not have this problem). I also tested this out again with MuseScore 2.3.2 and the issue persists there too.
This issue probably only rises for people that need an invisible voice for playback reasons and use chords with these adjacent notes (suspended chords etc.); I might have just stumbled upon this myself, as you suggested earlier. I can make do with the issue as I usually make a separate "playback" version when I'm done with a large project (and I can remove the invisible voice in the original score when I'm done). It would be useful if there was a way to "turn off" tremolos in the inspector, accents, etc. so they have no effect on playback; that way I don't need to make a separate voice that won't be affected by the ornament. I hope this clears up some confusion!

In reply to by Quinn Ouyang

OK, you are indeed probably the only person to encounter this due to the extremely unusual manipulations you are doing to exploit particular characteristics of the soundfont you are using. Feel free to submit an official bug report on this to the issue tracker, I'd call it "Minor" severity. Meanwhile, workaround is simply mirror one note manually with Shift+X.

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