Mordent playback?

• Aug 27, 2016 - 19:50

I am not sure if there is actually playback of mordents. Turns and trills absolutely but mordents I am not sure.

Here is the sheet music for Mozart's first piano sonata:

http://petrucci.mus.auth.gr/imglnks/usimg/9/97/IMSLP82506-PMLP01830-Moz…

This has a lot of mordents, staccato, trills, and turns. I'm not surprised. Mozart always made pieces more difficult than they needed to be(multiple repeats, lots of ornaments, key signature changes, etc.) and that is how Mozart became famous and known to everyone.

This happens to be something I am working on. I have made it to the 1 and only first movement repeat in there. I don't have all the articulation in there yet but I can't hear the mordents. I would definitely hear them if I was for real playing this sonata or if I listened to a pianist playing this sonata.

I doubt it is because the mordents are too fast(I can hear turns and trills at allegro so why not mordents).

I think it might be some kind of bug in the software(I believe musescore 2 was designed to add trill, turn, and mordent playback along with several other things).

So why am I not hearing any mordents I put in there?

Here is what I have so far of the sonata:

Attachment Size
Piano_Sonata_no._1.mscz 23.78 KB

Comments

Actually, I think it *is* time-related. Not on account of tempo, but note values. The default playback basically uses two thirty-second notes and a sixteenth for morderts, so it won't work if the note value is not at least an eighth. Same for turns. Not a bug, just a limitation of this particular aspect of playback (which, remember, is not the main purpose of MuseScore).

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Well couldn't you expand the mordent playback to at least sixteenths? That would mean 2 64ths and 1 32nd and that should perfectly be supported. Same with 32nds being 2 128ths and 1 64th.

So you are saying that unless the note is an eighth or longer, I won't hear the mordent in Musescore no matter the tempo? Well I can see why I wouldn't hear a 64th mordent since Musescore doesn't have 256th notes but I like knowing that the playback is perfect as well as the sheet music. And I am good at finding errors in the music and fixing them. So at least to me, a 16th mordent not being played back seems like an error(a minor one but still an error).

In reply to by Caters

Yes, I am saying that unless the note is an eighth or longer, then mordents won't playback. If you would like the playback facility enhanced to handle this case, feel free to file an official feature request to the issue tracker (see link at right of this page).

Again, the primary purpose of MsueScore is notation. not playback. We make an effort to provide a kind of rough approximation to how it might sound when played, but it's definitely very far from perfect.

Maybe part of MuseScore’s problem, in relation to Mozart, is that the digital computer’s representation of the extremely-short mordent would necessarily be precise, because a digital computer algorithm really doesn’t know how to be anything else.   But, when you listen to skilled human performers play these pieces, are the mordents and other embellishments being performed exactly as written?   I’m not so sure that they are.

A DAW program can capture the exact performance (in its piano-roll “timeline”), and I suspect that you would find that its score-view presentation of that performance would not exactly match Mozart’s writing of the same.

It seems appropriate to me, then, that MuseScore would choose paper as its primary product focus, whenever pressed into a choice between that goal and playback.   It allows you to transcribe, exactly, “Mozart’s writing of the same,” on paper, even if it does not play it back ... at all, or exactly as you would hear it from human performances.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.