Sonic Visualiser

h1. On Displaying Musical Scores

h3. Use cases

 # Illustrating recordings by attaching a full publication-style score

 ** ...where the score is not intended to be read closely, but rather used as a sort of key-frame reference for navigating the audio

 ** ...or where user expects to be able to zoom the score far enough to actually read it properly

 # Linear rather than page-based score that a user is expected to read, e.g. to play along with, or to check specific notes in a transcription or spectrogram

 # On-the-fly score display of transcriptions and related annotation layers (score from MIDI)

 # Score editing for correction (making usually small edits to substantial scores)

 # Score editing for annotation (generating small scores from scratch)

h3. Sources of score data

 * Score-encoding formats, e.g. MusicXML, MEI

 * PDFs of published scores

 * "Tidy" MIDI files and other cleaned-up annotation data (e.g. chord charts)

 * Untidy output from transcription methods and the like, in MIDI or MIDI-like formats

h3. Possible implementations

 # Integrate code from an existing application (most likely one that is also in C++ using Qt)

 ** Suitable for all use cases, with limitation of requiring score to be available in a digital format

 ** Only possibility if editing is required (but note that adding editing is likely to be very involved even with this approach, maybe prohibitively so)

 ** MuseScore -- most obvious option

 ** Rosegarden -- has a notation editor component but is primarily a sequencer (but does have the advantage that I wrote much of it and so know a lot of the code!)

 # Invoke external application to render to PDF or sequence of images, then display PDF/image pages

 ** Suitable for use case 1; unsuitable for use cases 2, 4, 5; uncertain for use case 3

 ** Replaces problem of "integrating score display" with problem of "integrating PDF/image page display"

 ** Could use MuseScore as the external application (it has a batch mode) or Lilypond, or something else like VexFlow, or more than one option depending on platform & input format

 ** Has advantage of also introducing ability to display other PDF material than scores

 ** Adds access to non-digital (scanned) score content

h3. Examples

*Linear*

MuseScore

!/attachments/download/1776/musescore-tidy-linear.png!

Rosegarden

!/attachments/download/1779/rosegarden-tidy-linear.png!

*Paginated*

MuseScore

!/attachments/download/1778/musescore-tidy-paginated.png!

Rosegarden

!/attachments/download/1780/rosegarden-tidy-paginated.png!

*Imported from an approximate transcription*

MuseScore

!/attachments/download/1775/musescore-messy.png!

Rosegarden

!/attachments/download/1777/rosegarden-messy.png!