Co-chair meeting minutes: May 23, 2025
SMuFL
To start the meeting, we had a brief discussion about whether we could or should try to formalise the criteria for whether a set of symbols can be considered for inclusion in SMuFL, since we have had a number of recent proposals that have presented difficulties in assessing whether they are in sufficiently common use.
Myke proposed that we use the following criteria: a symbol can be encoded in SMuFL if it has been used in at least two works by different composers and published by different, independent publishers. We welcome community feedback on this proposal.
MNX
After we made the MNX example documents more accessible in the filesystem, @paulbayleaf found a couple of errors which he reported in #422 and #423, which Adrian has now fixed.
Adrian has added a means of encoding common time and cut common time signatures, which closes issue #94. He has also added an example document that exercises these changes.
Adrian has also brought the MNX converter up to date with a number of the most recent changes to MNX, including to ties, accidentals, slurs, and so on. There are still further things on Adrian’s wish list that he plans to work on.
On the continuing topic of beams, Adrian has closed issues #299 and #399, leaving issue #419 open. (We spent the whole of our last meeting on 8 May discussing beams without arriving at any firm conclusions, which is why there were no minutes from that meeting.)
After a great deal of discussion, we believe we have hit upon a scheme for encoding beams that is both less verbose than the original proposal, but still completely explicit for every beam line. We will encode each visible beam line, specifying the first and last note in that beam (with the rule that grace notes encountered in the sequence are ignored). The beam object will itself be nestable, so beam lines after the primary beam will be encoded in a dictionary within the primary beam.
Adrian will write up our proposal and publish it in #419 for community feedback. The co-chairs all feel good about this proposal, and it has come after a great deal of consideration, so we hope it will meet with community approval!
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Thursday 5 June 2025.