Hi! This post is a summary of the work that was done for my GSoC 2019 project: Chord Symbol Playback.

Project description

This project aims to improve the experience of working with chord symbols in scores. Without being able to hear the harmony denoted by the chord symbols, it can be difficult to get a full idea of what a work of music might sound like in practice.

In my original proposal I hoped to, at minimum, solve a

We're almost done!

So far

This week was a lot of cleanup and making sure everything is good and cleaning up the final bits. That means writing a lot of tests to make sure everything will be good going forward and for new developers to work with. On the user side of this week, it was fairly uneventful, although there is some stuff to hopefully look forward to coming soon :)

Coming up

Sometime in the next week, I will

Into the final weeks!

So far

This last week was a lot of bug fixing. The first part, though, was spent finishing up some of the quality of life stuff that I started on last week. Here is what it looks like:

You can first see that there is a preference under "Note Input" that says "Play harmony while editing". It's on by default and allows users to have chords played back while editing chord symbols. What this means is

Just a couple weeks left!

So Far

Last week, I worked mainly on separate MIDI channels for harmony. The way it works is each part has the capacity to have its own harmony channel which is created whenever the first chord symbol is added or loaded. This channel shows up as a subchannel in the mixer for the corresponding part which means that it can be adjusted as its own channel. This allows us to change the instrument used to

In the final quarter!

So Far

This week has been a bit of an interesting week for me. I spent the first half of the week working on the stuff mentioned in last weeks blog before having to scrap all of it (for now at least) in favor of getting this project ready to be merged (so that everyone can use it sooner :)). I spent a couple days looking at TODOs and FIXMEs that I left behind and resolved

We're actually about 2/3 through now :) I was wrong last week

So far

Last week I worked mainly on testing, improving existing voicings, and the automatic extension system. For testing I realized that there were a lot of cases not being covered by the tests. In fact I modified one of the voicing algorithms and the corresponding test still passed since the issues I fixed were never even covered by the tests in the first place. Now the tests

We're past halfway through the official period!

So far

The last day I've beeen flying and having some issues with airport wifi so I apologize for the late blog pose (I'm home now though! :)). This week, I've been full speed ahead on voicing algorithms. I've got some kind of version of a few different algorithms and you can see them in action here:

And here is a look at the actual notes produced by a few of the algorithms

So Far

Last week I spent a lot of time on Qt and unfortunately did not get to implement the voicing algorithms I had mentioned last week. I wrote a lot of code and tried to design UIs that I ended up just scrapping, but I've landed on just a more basic system for handling user interaction. I've also improved the testing and fixed a couple bugs. I've also made a few stops this week around Tokyo which stole a

First evaluations done!

So far

Last week I ventured into some unfamiliar territory. I spent a lot of time reading code and documentation again to understand how to make UIs for MuseScore with Qt as well as to understand how to use the testing system. Qt is still pretty beastly to me, but I think I have a decent grasp on how to make something that is at least passably pretty to look at. I have set up the ground

We have some behind the scenes playback!

So far

Last week I was focused on making behind the scenes playback work. This is one of the pretty big steps in my opinion for the project as it allows for users to take advantage of this feature a lot more easily. To get something played back, there's nothing needed (in addition to adding the chord symbol) to get the chords symbols played back. We use the same voicing algorithm as before