This page is here to describe my thoughts on MusicEditor2, hereafter abbreviated Me2. Normally, I write notes to myself and eventually lose them. I thought I would try this medium.
Me2 is to be the second revision of my Music Notation project, an editor for common practice music notation. The original was done as an independent study for Mark Gudial in 2000. The project didn't live up to what I wanted - basically, it was much too limited in its functionality - and ever since I've been considering the sequel.
Motivations
In the last year or two Squeak has gotten some new toys that could help this project (info on these is on this swiki somewhere):
Midi writing
Advanced piano roll editing
vastly improved morphic layout (LayoutPolicy)
TT font support, keeps getting better, not quite standard yet?
I actually don't care about music notation a ton, but its prerequisite to some other toys:
A piano fingering toy - write in the fingerings above the notes
Algorithmic composition
Play-along systems
Some of my Goals
Achieve separation between the visual and internal representations of music. Be able to change between, say, common practice notation circa 1900, 14th century mensural notation, and piano roll.
Have a beautiful system - that means
font support - music requires precision positioning, size control, and unusal glyphs (I've actually got most of this working)
feels responsive, even if you have a million notes floating around in the system.
At completion (whatever that means) I'd like to be able to enter a movement of "Rite of Spring", and watch it scroll and play smoothly.
Have a system that is clear and simple enough for others to leverage.
For much later
Goals of some future project, too nebulous to plan now, but what I consider the "Unified Field Theory" of music editing.
Treat midi and sampled(wav) data the same; be able to get a decent midi type view of wav music. (i'm working for the constant-Q transform for this now)
Modern music coordinates instruments with electronic processing.
Be able to assemble a (static in the simple case) digital effects setup from common pieces such as phasers, equalizers, reverb, etc. (at some point, no longer a real-time proposition)
Associate a musical track with an effects setup.
Control the effects in the time domain; in other words score stuff for the effects as well as instruments.
