Show 32th+ notes in sheet music

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Quocnam
Posts: 5

Post by Quocnam »

How do i show 32th+ notes in sheet music? :anxious:
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Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

This can't be done today. For MIDI files (where we have to guess at what the sheet music is supposed to be), enabling 32nd notes makes a disaster of everything when the song was recorded live by a human without any quantization.

The good news is that this is coming rather soon when loading MusicXML files. We got most of the preliminaries for loading that kind of file (which contains much more of the original musical information than MIDI files) into Synthesia 10.8. Each release going forward, the plan is to incorporate more and more of that musical information into the sheet music. And 32nd notes are on the short list.
Quocnam
Posts: 5

Post by Quocnam »

What does the musicxml file have but the midi file doesn’t :?:
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Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Your typical MIDI files are (more or less) a long list of "note on" and "note off" events. Imagine something like "turn channel 5's middle C pitch note on at time 370321 microseconds" and then maybe "turn channel 5's middle C pitch off at time 410030 microseconds". Besides a couple niceties like a "tempo" or "key signature" event at the beginning of the file and maybe a "release the pedal"/"push the pedal" every so often, that's about the best you can expect in the general case. Even inferring what kind of sheet music note those events would correspond to (say, eighth vs. dotted quarter) is a complete guess. (That's if they correspond to anything at all! It is not uncommon to have more "note on" events than "note off", at which point you're stuck grasping at where the "notes" even are.) :grimace:

MusicXML files make their best attempt at encoding the sheet music directly. "Next, there is a filled notehead on the third line up on the top staff, it will sound like a C, will last for a quarter second, has a tenuto accent, and has a stem. We recommend that stem should be 3.5 staff spaces long, and that stem is connected to the double-beam that has been continuing for three notes now." The number of different things it can talk about is kind of staggering.
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