Spatial playback and notation

• Oct 8, 2020 - 12:14

I enjoyed yesterday's MuseScore Cafe video - thank you Marc.

It occurs to me that sometimes - maybe quite often - one wants to use spatial features for performers. I'm sure some composers write spatial details in scores - perhaps just as written notes/instructions - though it's up to the performers what they actually do.

For a choral piece one might expect sopranos to be on the left, contraltos more central, with tenors and bass more over to the right. That however would only be one arrangement.

For an instrumental piece one might use two instruments where just based on the notes alone one would do. Thus two cellists could face one another off - one on the left, one on the right, to allow antiphonal effects.

I wonder if a syntax [maybe optional] could be devised to allow this in Musescore. Obviously text instructions can be written in, but it would be good if the Player [Play Panel] could act on spatial instructions. This might be very useful for some testing and teaching purposes, and as yesterdays Musescore Cafe showed, Musescore is now not only being used to create printed texts.

Personally I "solve" these issues by exporting what I create in Midi to a DAW, and then I set the spatial locations in the DAW, but it would clearly be easier and faster for prototyping if this could be done directly in Musescore. This would not prevent users from later on doing an export to a DAW and more refined work, but could make a big difference for creating some pieces - as in the choral examples seen yesterday, and would enable changes and ideas to be tested out very much more quickly.

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