MusicXML

[Tokkemon]

I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/

It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will give so much more richness to the data set.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Hopefully they will use JSON5 so comments can be included. The loss of comments when switching from XML to JSON was a disaster in other domains.

[adrianh]

Hi, I'm the person running the MNX project! Contributions welcome — we're making good progress and the new format is going to be really fantastic.

[microtherion]

I've written two music apps that use MusicXML as their native representation (https://woodshed.in is the newer one), so I've been involved in this world as well.

MusicXML is a great effort to tackle a very difficult problem, but some of the details can get rather hairy (e.g. having to represent many concepts twice, once for the visual aspect, and once for the performance aspect; or how exactly to express incomplete slurs). Interoperability in practice seems to be fairly limited (Possibly because for many music programs, MusicXML import/export is an afterthought).

One of the biggest contributions a new standard could make is to provide as complete a test suite as possible of various musical concepts (and their corner cases!) and their canonical representation. It looks like MNX has already made good efforts in this direction.

[Exoristos]

> they recently switched to JSON

Considering this data is machine-generated and machine-ingested, moving away from XML seems like a big step down.

[account-5]

Never heard of either before but having looked at the comparison [0] I think I prefer the XML version.

[0] https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/comparisons/musicxml/

[gnulinux]

How about MEI?

https://music-encoding.org/about/

This is what MuseScore 4 will soon start using.

[Kye]

How well does MusicXML (and MNX) represent the full range of notation? It seems like an exceptionally hard problem.

Related: Can it handle non-Western notations?

[odyssey7]

How would you explain the relationship between MNX and SMuFL?

[AdmiralAsshat]

MusicXML is old hat. All the cool kids are using MusicJSON now.

EDIT: I'd like to clarify that I posted this comment, as a joke, before the below comment went on to clarify that there was, in fact, a JSON-based rewrite of the music standard in progress:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460827

Never change, tech world!

[geodel]

I hear you don't want to go (Cloud)Native else you'd be using MusicYAML now.

[OfSanguineFire]

Please don't post one-line jokes on HN. The longstanding culture of this venue finds that inappropriate.

[jonathrg]

I have not had much success using MusicXML to switch between different notation programs. Trying to read a score exported from Musescore as MusicXML in Sibelius or vice versa feels worse than switching between Microsoft Office and other ostensibly compatible formats.

Does anyone have any success stories?

[adrianh]

This is a common complaint, and it's something we're trying to remedy with MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/

Music notation is incredibly complex, and there are many places things can go wrong. There's a wide spectrum of error situations, such as:

* The exporting application "thinks" about notation in a different way than the importing application (i.e., it has a different mental model).

* MusicXML provides multiple ways of encoding the same musical concept, and some applications don't take the effort to check for all possible scenarios.

* Some applications support a certain type of notation while others don't.

* MusicXML doesn't have a semantic way of encoding certain musical concepts (leading applications to encode them as simple text (via the words element), if at all.

* Good ol' fashioned bugs in MusicXML import or export. (Music notation is complex, so it's easy to introduce bugs!)

[im3w1l]

I recently used a funny workflow involving MusicXML. I wanted to learn a song that I only had sheet music for and not being much of a sightsinger, I had manually input the sheet music into Vocaloid so I could sing along with it (OCR exists but in my experience is in such a sorry state and requires so many manual fix ups that for the moment it's easier to type it in manually. As for enterring the data I have experimented and I'm significantly faster and more accurate with a piano roll than typing note names in musescore).

Now as this song had nonsense lyrics and many repetitions and almost-repetitions, the structure of the song didn't quite pop out to me, so what I did was export a midi from vocaloid that I opened musescore. From musescore I then exported it as MusicXML. I opened that in Notepad++ for the sole purpose of pretty printing the xml to normalize the texual representation and saved it right back. I took that and opened it in a jupyter notebook where I scraped it for <measure> elements with regular expressions and then I searched for repeating ones, that I assembled into repeating segments and sub-segments.

This helped me memorize the song.

What I liked about MusicXML was that it was self-documenting enough that I didn't need to reference documentation and I could find candidates for normalization quite easy (for instance I didn't care about directions of stems or inferred dynamics).

A gotcha is that Musescore 4 has a bug where it doesn't show the "midi import" where you can adjust the duration quantization, this didn't matter to me for this song, but I did bite me once in the past when opening a midi from Vocaloid. Musescore 3 works. Without playing around with that there can be an issue where it infers 16th notes as staccato 8th notes and similar.

[Rochus]

Anyone remembering IEEE 1599? Seems to share a lot of goals.

And there are actually a lot of alternatives, e.g. ABC notation, Alda, Music Macro Language, LilyPond, to name a few. Difficult to decide which one to prefer.

[rooster117]

I've relied on this format to store songs in my iOS app for years. Representing notation is an interesting problem to solve.

[1-6]

Seems like MusicXML is a great format for ML applications. You need to start somewhere and machine-readable code is important.

[treyd]

MusicXML seems to be more for notation and sheet music typesetting rather than algorithmic operations on the notes themselves. Sure you could train a model on it but you'd be better off doing it on the specific domain and classically translating up to the XML format.

[recursive]

If you want to do ML on notation, then maybe. MIDI or PCM audio might be a better place to start if you want to work directly on the music.

[DonBarredora]

Dear god, stop using XML already.