Hi! I have given the issue of sophisticated orchestral playback from score editors a lot of thought since VSL released its Performance Tool, back in... 2007-ish?
In the end, it all comes down to SEANS: Score Editors Are Not Sequencers. Should they actually be? Score editors are geared towards visual information, like a word processor. Sequencers are geared towards auditory information. Even if the visuals of a score are meant to express sounds, both representations have different, and sometimes contradictory, idiosyncratic needs. It is very difficult to keep both synchronized, that's one of the reasons why training classical musicians takes a lot of years. You may want to have a look at some projects that try somehow to achieve it, like Cubase, Sibelius, Finale, Rosegarden or MusE2. Do they succeed to the extent you would wish for? Let's take a very basic parameter: volume, or sound dynamics. What does a "mp" marking mean? Does it mean the same, dB-wise, for a clarinet or for an oboe? For a section of four trombones? Which MIDI controls does an orchestral library use to change dynamics? What dynamics are represented in its sample data? Does note velocity/CC7 = "0" mean total silence, or the quietest note a player can produce, to better spread the full 128 range available? Getting full control of the possibilities a sophisticated modern orchestral library takes a lot of tweaking. Allowing it inside a score editor leads ultimately to embed a sequencer in it, which tends to be complicated and cumbersome. In the end, most MIDI orchestral musicians end up separating both tasks, accepting the fact that the audio output of a score editor has a lot of limitations and only taking it as an extremely rough draft, just to check for gross pitch or rhythm mistakes. Normally they do the score first, export to MIDI and then import it in their sequencer. What if after a lot of sequencing they decide to change a note? Tough luck, they have to keep both representations synchronized manually. Could it be possible to tightly synchronize a certain score editor with a certain sound library, in order to get more realistic performances out of the score's visual symbols? I think so, but I also think it would take a lot of sophisticated algorithmic decisions (i.e. scripting), not just additional mappings or event editing, and would somehow lock both products in a tight coupling, so any change to one of them would need a revision of this "virtual conductor" between them, so it would take a lot of maintenance. 2 €¢ Cheers, L ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Find and fix application performance issues faster with Applications Manager Applications Manager provides deep performance insights into multiple tiers of your business applications. It resolves application problems quickly and reduces your MTTR. Get your free trial! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/ gampad/clk?id=1444514301&iu=/ca-pub-7940484522588532 _______________________________________________ Mscore-developer mailing list Mscore-developer@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mscore-developer
