Synthesia 11 Release Estimate

[JimNYC]

After many years of saying there are still many years to go on Synthesia 11, all of a sudden it is looking like there is a good chance that the entirety of beautifully-engraved MusicXML-based sheet music might only take a few more months of integration work instead of more years of from-scratch development.

That's excellent news!! In the past year and a half, I still have yet to find something works as smoothly as Synthesia for custom songs.

If you need any help testing, please don't hesitate to reach out!!!

[JimNYC]

I haven't tested it yet, but I know the library has extensive support for arbitrarily printing text (lyrics, tempo directions, TAB notation, tuplet beat counts, etc.) in the music. So, even if it's something that doesn't exist yet, it will be easier to add it there than to add it to Synthesia.

The code is right on GitHub and the author seems to welcome outside contributions, so it's something I could help maintain, add features to, and fix bugs. (That's probably the most attractive part of the idea. If it were a closed library, I would be stuck with whichever bugs were in there and might have to tell users "sorry, I can't do anything about it". For such an important part of Synthesia, I would never put myself or its users in that position. But because there's ready access to fix things, it should work nicely.)

It looks like fingering is already in Lomse from a previous release. From the change log of version 0.29.0 (current version is 0.30.0 from September):

Version 0.29.0 (11/Mar/2022)
More music notation supported:
Fingering
Pedal marks
All accidental signs
Non-standard key signatures
Full support for cue notes

Improvements in MusicXML support:
Enable edition in MusicXML
Import <staff-lines> elements
Import <defaults> element
Import rest placement on the staff
Import <fingering> elements
Support MusicXML files encoded in UTF-16

[Nicholas]

That's nice to hear a confirmation.

There will still be the extra step of connecting Synthesia's auxiliary finger hint information to the renderer. Otherwise it would only be able to show hints stored in the MusicXML file itself and not those you add via the in-app interface or via metadata, etc. But I don't anticipate that being too tricky.

Well... maybe. There's an interesting correspondence problem between the falling note blocks and the sheet music anytime you have a proper repeat. There will be two (or more) note blocks that represent the same note in the sheet music... so what should be shown in the sheet music if you assign different finger hints to each block?

It's not even that pathological of a question: if it's the last note in the repeated section before choosing between different endings, you may actually want to use a different finger the second time around to lead into the new section that follows. Hmm. I suppose having something in the falling notes that becomes slightly inexpressible in the sheet music isn't the end of the world. I could probably choose whatever is the easiest answer (the hint on the first note block "win" for the sheet music view, etc.)

[JimNYC]

Does this even exist as a construct in actual sheet music? If not, then I would just take the path of least resistance and assign it the first one (as well as having fingering as an option to display or not). If someone really wanted to express different fingering like your scenario in sheet music, they could always collapse the repeats in music editing software and duplicate the sections instead of repeats. Then it would be easy to assign it different fingering for each block.

[Electrode]

I know it's been a while since this post was last updated, but you could do what usually happens in sheet music when alternate fingers are provided. Alternate fingerings are either provided (depending on publisher/edition) by using slash notation or brackets/parentheses.

So, you could express alternate fingering by using 2/3 or 2(3), for example, for a main fingering choice of 2 with the alternate being 3. Of course, this only works for individual changes. For a group of notes with alternate fingering, things might get a little more complicated. That might require something like this, perhaps:

[Nicholas]

That's interesting. I don't recall seeing the slash/parenthesis notation before. In Behind Bars, finger substitution is shown (on p.309) with a dash between the two fingers... but this isn't really finger substitution either. There isn't any mention there of alternate fingerings.

(I like the footnote on that page, hehe.)