Making Hairpins Intelligent

• Jun 24, 2018 - 13:01

Haripins in MuseScore don’t seem to be very ‘bright’. It is a truth universally acknowledged in contemporary music, that harpins should always be preceded and succeeded by a dynamic marking …otherwise how would one know at which dynamic to start and end with?

If you set dynamics and then insert hairpins between them, the hairpins seem to set their horizontal start and end positions in relation to the note heads with which they are associated. This is a problem, because hairpins form part of the horizontal ‘dynamic stratum’ in music, which includes dynamic markings such as fff and ppp. (Hairpins and dynamic markings form part of the same line.)

If you set fff and ppp, then MuseScore /always/ makes the hairpins overlap with the dynamics, and the poor old user has to spend several lifetimes adjusting every hairpin, so that it does not overlap with the dynamic marking that it is changing from and to.

dumb_hairpins.gif

Let’s face it, this is a notation bug. Can hairpins automatically align their extremities with dynamics and automatically adjust their length, so as not to collide with them? Life is too short; MuseScore hairpins are often too long. Let their start and end points align automatically to the left and right edges of the dynamic settings that they link. ‘p’ is not as wide as ‘ppp’ etc. Can MuseScore be taught that?


Comments

It is indeed - in general, MuseScore 3 will have a fair amount of this sort of collision detection built in.

Meanwhile, though, the usual method I recommend is to start the hairpin with the note after the dynamic. Works great except when you need the change to begin during the note with the dynamic (eg, if it's a whole note). In those cases, I get good at the sequence "shift+tab ctrl+right ctrl+right" which I do immediately after pressing the shortcut to add the hairpin (while it's still in edit mode).

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