#musicxml

I'll admit, I'm getting a little bogged down by having to read several different Django tutorials that all basically say the same thing.

Dain explains in the Advanced Beginner Challenge that it's about social context — by the time we actually begin to work with the code, we will have seen the instructions a bunch of times and gotten a sense of the community and best practices.

And I'm doing it! But I couldn't help myself — I started some other projects.

I've been interested, for a long time, in software that would help musical theater collaboration teams to work better together. Of course, what comes to mind right away is a fully-featured, online collaboration tool, with everything from videoconferencing to version control to task management…

But honestly, it's way beyond my skill level. And anyway, there are a zillion different tools that already do those things better than I likely ever could.

I realized today, though, that Final Draft and Finale — the applications my collaborator and I use to write musicals together — both export data in some form of XML. Between the two applications, there's a lot of redundancy. One of those redundancies is lyrics.

That is to say, when my collaborator prepares a libretto for a scene that includes a song, and I prepare a lead sheet or fully-realized arrangement of a song, we both type in the lyrics manually. Because of that, there's a high chance of discrepancies between the two, especially when we're both tired and overwhelmed.

It's the kind of thing that a music editor would help to mitigate, but that's… not always in the cards.

So I thought, What if there's a way to extract lyrics from both MusicXML files and Final Draft documents and compare them?

As I began to dive in to the file formats, I realized it's no easy task: Final Draft creates <text></text> tags for every word, and MusicXML's specification separates words by syllable.

I was, ultimately, able to create a function that concatenates MusicXML syllables extracted from an uncompressed .musicxml file with one voice and print() the resulting text to the screen.

And as I tried to make sense of Final Draft's implementation of XML (with some friends' sample scripts at my fingertips), I thought, There's got to be a way to parse this and convert it to HTML so folks don't have to spend $250 on the software just to be able to open their collaborators' scripts. Surely, there are implementations out there.

I even spent some time learning how to render a website so it looks like a page, and how to make print-friendly CSS. How cool would it be to make a Flask app that accepts a Final Draft script, extracts metadata, and renders a nice, HTML site that's paginated and printable?

In my cursory search, I found a parser by Alex Coppen called screenplay-parser. But, perhaps more interestingly, I found his specification for a ScreenJSON file format that treats screenplays as JSON objects. It's pretty cool.

And it's a cool medium- to long-term project: to figure out how to implement a web application — probably in Django — that can accept a ScreenJSON object and render a rich, web-friendly screenplay, complete with access control for each element, version control, and tons of metadata.

As far as I can tell, it's not been implemented yet, and Coppen's ScreenJSON specification is yet to be adopted.

What if there's a future in which I could develop a web-based tool that can read and write MusicXML and Final Draft, store an annotated, canonical libretto with version control and hypertext to sound files and sheet music, and can even automate the process of creating an integrated score? Lilypond is supposed to be very good at automatic music formatting, and there are tools to convert MusicXML to Lilypond.

Did Chopin use more black keys than Beethoven? 

To answer this question I created this interactive dataviz. You can choose among several musical scores and see a barchart of the amount of notes played in each score. 

MusikMesse - Launching neoScores - MusicXML Community Meeting & Nomination Data News Awards!

We are sending you this neoScores community update from MusikMesse, the biggest music and professional audio fair in Europe (Frankfurt, Germany). We are here all week so please stop by if you are around. You can find us in Hal 3.1, b12.

Needless to say that are bumping into the most amazing innovations on the level of instruments and music technology. We ourselves are constantly busy. Our days are fully booked with appointments with sheet music pubishers andmusic organizations. We also enjoy the countless unexpected and very inspiring meetings with developers, musicians, conductors and other stakeholders with whom we discuss digital sheet music.

Today, March 14, is a very special day for us! We are officially launching the neoScores web application, here at MusikMesse! Around noon journalists and partners will gather for the neoSores introduction in the Congress Center of Hal 5.1. Exciting!

Also today, at 2 pm, we will be hosting the MusicXML Community Meeting at MusikMesse. MusicXML is the format for music notation and digital sheet music that we use for the neoScores web application. About 50 developers from all over the world will be gathering here today to discuss the future of sheet music. We can’t wait to meet them!

And the good news show doesn’t end. We are nominated for the Data News Awards in the category ‘Start-up’. The Data News Awards are the most prestigious awards in Belgium for IT companies. We are very proud to stand next to IT giants like Microsoft, Deloitte, Accenture, etcetera.

With your help we might make it to the shortlist or even win this Award! You can vote by clicking on this link:http://acties.datanews.knack.be/default/acties/datanews/awards/

Before you reach our category, you will need to go through a few other sections. As it might be difficult for you to choose for the right companies (since you won’t know them all), we hereby offer you our voting advice (votes go to our partners). But of course, feel free to vote for the company of your own choice.

Thank you very much! We hope to meet you soon on www.neoscores.com, or get in touch with us via [email protected] or via social media.

Greetings from MusikMesse!

The neoScores Team

Our voting advice for the Data News Awards:

1. Customer Satisfaction Award > Deloitte

2. Cloud Service > Deloitte

3. Big Data Solution > Microsoft

4. Mobile Innovator >TagTagCity

5. Entreprise Collaborative Solution > Microsoft

6. HR Solution > Acerta

7. Outsourcing Solution > Accenture

8. Telecom Solution > Other: Mobile Vikings

9. Belgian Company > Cronos

10. Start-up > neoScores (!!!)

11. Storage Solution > Dell