Deeper scale support for note input, visualization and RNA

• Aug 27, 2022 - 10:22

This is a follow-up from issue https://musescore.org/en/node/334632 since it was suggested there that the forum was a better place for this sort of discussion.

Basically, upon following Marc's course, I was wondering if it would be worthwhile to make MuseScore understand more about scales than key signatures.

As far as I am aware of, the main musical scale features that are not currently understood by MuseScore (cannot be specified using some engraving mark or setting in a way that affects the software's behavior) are...

  • Stating what notes are in and out of the scale (a key signature is not enough for this if your scale allows for a little chromaticism inbetween notes in a way that is not normally represented by the key signature, as in the blues scale)
  • Stating what the root note is
  • For a few scales, understanding exotic alteration patterns that cannot be encoded by a key signature, like melodic minor (don't use the same alterations when going up and down) and non-octave-repeating patterns.

Since music can change scale or switch between modes halfway through, there would need to be a way to encode this in the score as well, perhaps through some invisible marks.

What features would support for these notions allow ?

  • Smoother note input, thanks to a reduced need to specify accidentals when working in an unusual scale
    • This is partly addressed in current MuseScore by custom key signatures. If you don't want to inflict these onto performers, you can just change to a standard key signature at the end.
    • What is currently less than ideal and can AFAIK not be hacked around even with a very weird custom key signature is support for scales with more than 7 notes. As far as I know, note input only understands A-G, which in fact is already a bit of a problem for drum input, where fast input may require some frequent drumset editing.
  • Highlighting what notes are in key and out of key as a composer helper tool (could perhaps be handled by a plugin given some context on what is the scale for a given section of the piece).
  • Highlighting scale degrees (same as above, but also requires root note context).
  • Making roman numeral analysis less of a manual analysis tool and more of a composition tool through various usability improvements:
    • Type in a degree, it selects a sensible defaut (triad, or maybe 7th if you're into jazz :)) chord quality.
    • Type in a note name, it selects a sensible degree and then follows up with the above.
    • Take the RNA of a chord progression and autogenerate a basic chord progression following that RNA as appropriate for the active root note.
    • Keep RNA and chord progressions in sync as the partition evolves. If you tweak a chord degree or quality in one, it changes it in the other too.

I guess the questions to be answered here are...

  • What is already possible in this area that I don't know about, using either raw MuseScore feature or plugins
  • What would be doable by a plugin with decent ergonomics
  • What would require direct integration into MuseScore to work out well
  • How interested would people other than me be in such scale support features

Comments

Yes to decouple the key signature and scale/key.
I use MS3's "Diatonic pitch up" and down function extensively, which depends on the key/scale logic enforced by all keysig(even the open/no keysig). If you want to transcribe a tonal piece where one instrument use her own keysig/no keysig like the Horn, it'd be nice to assign her key/scale, decoupled from her keysig, to follow other instruments, otherwise she alone is out of tune. OP's idea could fix this.
How does other software such as finale sibelius dorico handle this nowadays?
get E instead of Eb

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In reply to by msfp

I know this is unpopular, but you could just transcribe the horn part for horn in F and be done with it.

But before you bring up "composer's intent", think about this. Depending on when a piece was written, do you suspect that the composer intended for this piece to be played on a modern instrument? Bach wrote for natural trumpet. Yet most of the time parts are played on modern high pitched valved instruments. Do you suspect that early composers intended for their pieces to be recorded? Thereby limiting interpretation to that one performance. And worse, playback on a computer regardless of the quality of the sounds?

This sounds to me like you want MuseScore to compose the music for you. You want the program to tell you if notes are in the chosen scale or not. You want it to suggest melody direction and chords.
I have been composing for a long time and can tell you that I have never written anything based on a scale. Key signature? Yes. Why? If you base something on a scale, you are limited to the notes in that scale. If you write based on a key signature, you can vary any note as you wish.
Composing is not easy. We all want shortcuts. But if you want to write music, some things need to happen. You need to listen to a lot of different kinds of music. You have to play an instrument. Play a lot of different kinds of music in different kinds of groups.

In reply to by bobjp

I respectfully disagree with this assessment of my intent.

I do not want MuseScore to write the music for me, I just want it to help me and hopefully others in the difficult process of learning more music theory to feed their composition process.

From having tried the intuitive approach that you advocate (composing from listening and performing experience alone) in isolation for a number of years, I am convinced that there are serious benefits to complementing it (not replacing it, obviously) with the more analytical view that music theory training proposes. Here are some reasons why.

The intuitive approach is particularly prone to getting you stuck in a certain musical comfort zone. Patterns that you don't hear/play often do not get memorized well, so unless you take an enormous effort to avoid it, you inevitably end up mostly learning the clichés of the music you're most used to, and learning anything else very slowly and laboriously. You can try to avoid this through experimentation, but this is actually a very slow and thankless exercise since ultimately, there are not that many musical patterns that sound good, so I would certainly not recommend that to beginners. In contrast, formal musical theory training tends to go for the opposite extreme of enumerating lots of different musical patterns, all put on the same footing irrespective of how common or niche they are. This is often derided as wasting your time on lots of stuff you'll never use, but is also a great way to broaden your musical horizons.

Another benefit of musical theory training is that it gives you lots of names for musical patterns, that you can subsequently use to more easily discuss musical concepts with others who underwent similar training. If your only sources of learning are listening and performing, you will eventually learn a couple of these names, but very slowly and incompletely, so it's a lot harder to exchange with others and you're more isolated in your learning process.

And an important third benefit of formal training is that it gives you an analysis framework that you can use to more easily understand and learn from the music of others. It does so by letting you mentally break down other people's complex music into simpler components, study these components separately, and only then see how they combine with each other to form a cohesive whole. And it also helps by giving you mental shorthands for relatively complex sounding patterns (this is a scale pattern, this is a I-vi-IV-V chord progression, this is that particular flavor of counterpoint...). What all of this does is to make other people's work less impenetrable, by breaking down the wall of mental complexity into building blocks that are more digestible to your brain, so you learn more of it and more efficiently.

All this to say : I think there are significant benefits to learning to compose with a more analytical mindset. And if computers can help us at doing so by automating away some of the evil tedium of getting used to the music theory mindset (such as needing to constantly juggle with 12 slightly different versions of the same idea because transposition), I would argue that's a good thing.

In reply to by Hadrien Grasland

@ Hadrien. I neglected to say that I have a music education degree. I never meant to imply that theory wasn't important. But theory alone isn't enough. Theory can tell you what a composer did. But not necessarily why. In class, we took a Chopin Etude and analyzed it for chord structure, key and tonal centers and themes. We had to mark on a score all these things. On what beat did the shift to a new key begin. When did the new key arrive. It may or may not have been formally notated because it was only temporary. In which case, when did it end. We did every kind of analysis you can think of. We knew what Chopin did. But why he did what he did was always a much more interesting question for me. All the theory stuffed into my brain could not answer that question. Sure I could possibly imitate. But that was unsatisfactory.

There is no reason to not use MuseScore to help learn music theory. But for me, music is not theory. It is a living breathing thing with life of its own. Reducing it to mere mathematics has no appeal for me.

In reply to by bobjp

In the end, I think we agree more than appearances suggest :) I totally agree that theory isn't enough, I'm just at a point in my life where I realize that I swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction and actually need to (re-)learn more of it, after running away from it as a kid for the reasons that you describe : endless boring and meaningless cataloguing of musical constructs that certainly help describe the "what", but not so much understand the "why".

From more positive recent learning experiences, I think that one major factor that plays a big part in how much learning theory concepts help understand music, as opposed to simply describe it, is how much time the educator spends at immediately following the introduction of every new theoretical concept by multiple examples of that concept being applied in context, as isolated as possible from other concepts taught elsewhere in the class, to show precisely what musical effect is achieved through a certain construct.

The hooktheory interactive books, while they have their flaws, nail down this particular part of the teaching process near perfectly. And I wish my childhood music theory classes did more of it, it sounds like a pedagogical no-brainer when spelled out this way...

In reply to by Hadrien Grasland

Indeed. In four years of college level music theory, we learned why a certain chord follows another in all major time periods. Or why counterpoint moves the way it does. So many rules that I can't say that I remember or have used most of them. I don't believe that a composition has to be complicated to be good. But if someone is going to write something complicated, they should really know what they are doing. Not complicated for its own sake.

>>What is already possible in this area that I don't know about, using either raw MuseScore feature or plugins
buggy.png
MS3 buildin, seems buggy to me, can't find doc in handbook
7 modes only
Minor = Aeolion/natural minor only, which is meaningless in this context

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