News

Thank you to all who attended our third annual MusicXML community meeting at Musikmesse! We had 42 attendees who signed in. This year’s meeting focused on framing the future for MusicXML development. Our agenda proceeded as follows:

• A brief introduction to MusicXML. Nearly everyone attending was already familiar with MusicXML, so we covered this quickly.
• MusicXML community progress over the past year since our last meeting, focusing on the 25 new applications that have added MusicXML support in that time.
• An update on the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) project, presented by Daniel Spreadbury from Steinberg.
• Future directions for MusicXML: content and governance, presented by Joe Berkovitz from Noteflight.

The presentations took 90 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of focused discussion on the future directions for MusicXML. This was followed by an hour-long reception sponsored by Hal Leonard / Noteflight.

The MusicXML presentation material from all three presenters is available at:

The 2015 MusicXML Meeting

The attendee list and a summary of the meeting discussion is available at:

Report from the 2015 MusicXML Community Meeting

Nicolas Froment from MuseScore made a video recording of the meeting, including the presentation and the discussions. If you have not attended one of these meetings before, here is a great opportunity to see and hear the faces and voices behind the names.

To summarize the discussion, most people who spoke at the meeting were favorably inclined towards Joe’s proposal to move MusicXML to a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Community Group. There was support for adding more notational semantics to MusicXML – not just the what, but also the how and why behind notation layout. Joe showed an example of how MusicXML could evolve to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology that intrigued many people.

The meeting met my goals for getting a better sense of the MusicXML community’s reaction to a possible change of governance to the W3C, as well as some of the general directions for future MusicXML evolution. We will continue discussion of these topics online in the MusicXML forum.

Change of governance is not a simple matter for the companies involved. It seems it would be best for MusicXML and SMuFL to both be transferred together to a standards organization rather than proceeding separately. So there are discussions that will need to happen at MakeMusic, Steinberg, the W3C, and elsewhere. Given the strategic nature of the technologies there is no guarantee that this transfer will happen, but gauging the community’s interest was a key step in this potential evolution.

I would like to once again thank:

• Hal Leonard and Noteflight for sponsoring the reception.
• Joe Berkovitz and Daniel Spreadbury for their excellent presentations.
• The Musicbiz Lounge & Congress and Musikmesse staff for their top-flight support.
• Nicolas Froment for the video recording.
• All the meeting attendees for the lively and informative discussion.

As long as Musikmesse makes this Musicbiz Lounge & Congress venue available to us, we plan to keep this as an annual event. Next year’s Musikmesse is from April 7 to 10, with many changes in store. The Friday date seems to work well, so we’ll tentatively plan for the fourth annual MusicXML meeting on Friday, April 8, 2016.