Evan Lenz

I’m trying to figure out what file format(s) to support in PianoNinja. Synthesia has gone the route of “blind devotion to MIDI files” and its attendant pitfalls when it comes to notating music. I’ve already gotten a glimpse of these drawbacks now that I’ve tried to add the left-hand/right-hand distinction to PianoNinja. Some MIDI files separate the hands into two different tracks, and some don’t. And there doesn’t seem to be a standard way of doing this. Also, there are other visual cues built into Klavarskribo that I want to include, like bar lines, note beams, rests, continuation dots, etc. These aren’t going to be easy to derive from simplistic MIDI ON and OFF events, especially since the best MIDI files as far as performance goes would tend to be the worst as far as deriving notation goes. That’s my suspicion anyway. I get the impression that there are features of MIDI files that could allow them to provide notational hints, but those are optional and so they can’t be totally relied on.

MusicXML, on the other hand, is designed for representing musical information that can be notated. The biggest disadvantage I see of using MusicXML is that it’s not nearly as widely available as MIDI files are. Where do I go to find MusicXML files anyway? Do I have to purchase them? Do they only exist transiently on their path from Finale to Sibelius or vice versa? If I can get sufficiently past that hurdle, then it seems that I should go with MusicXML.

But there might be some other disadvantages to MusicXML also. Traditional notation requires you to make certain decisions about things like key signatures, whereas key signatures are optional in Klavarskribo (represented by a circle or diamond at the beginning of the piece on the relevant line for major or minor keys, as well as other shapes for different modes IIRC). Are they optional in MusicXML? Or does MusicXML force you to make certain distinctions that Klavarskribo doesn’t require? If MusicXML files were as abundant as MIDI files, I wouldn’t worry so much about this. I’d just take what I need and leave what I don’t need. But if I want to promote the proliferation of PianoNinja music across the Web, would MusicXML raise the bar too high? The purist in me doesn’t want to have to decide whether a note is B-flat or A-sharp in the underlying format when that distinction may not ever appear on the screen in PianoNinja.

So maybe what’s needed is a new “KlavarML” format, along with a converter from MusicXML to KlavarML (using XSLT of course). I presume there are already converters from MIDI to MusicXML (insofar as they’re able to). I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. But I also don’t want to be held back by unnecessary technological limitations. Both MIDI and MusicXML provide too much information. MIDI has lots of performance/interpretation-specific information that’s not relevant to Klavarskribo (although theoretically could be relevant to PianoNinja insofar as the scroll speed could dynamically vary, but I digress). MusicXML makes distinctions that Klavarskribo and PianoNinja do not. And MIDI doesn’t provide enough information.

Whether a “KlavarML” becomes an interchange format or an internal format specific to PianoNinja, I still like the idea. At the very least, the exercise of designing it would help clarify the whole domain of what it is I need to represent in PianoNinja. And it would also give me another opportunity to use RELAX NG.