Haystack Blog

Many years ago I discovered NoteWorthy Composer, and I’ve been using it for music notation ever since.

Unfortunately, I find that NoteWorthy doesn’t scale very well in several important dimensions. In particular, it lacks the ability to:

• Let the user manipulate multiple staves at once (even just for copying/cutting and pasting a horizontal section of music from one place/time to another).
• View several staves as a single “condensed” score.
• Save vertical screen estate by hiding staffs containing only rests for a given interval (Stravinsky-style “cutout scores”) .
• Switch rapidly between transposed and untransposed views of the parts in the music, and handle copy/paste between transposed parts. For instance, (Bb) trumpet parts are “written” two semitones higher than they “sound”, so when you copy a melody from a piano part (untransposed) to the trumpet, it should appear as if it was transposed up by two semitones.
• Hide presentation details from the user. I spend much time adjusting the location of staff items (like an “mf” dynamic marking) so they don’t collide. Also, copy/paste works on a too low level (see above), so if you copy a melody from a treble clef part into a bass clef part, or from a location with one key signature to one with another, the result will be incorrect until fixed manually. Also, the current clefs and time/key signatures are not shown to the left of the screen like they ought to.
• Associate note velocities recorded with a MIDI keyboard with notes in the score for improved expressiveness in future playback. Actually, I want more than this: I also want the ability to record volume changes (e.g. from an external MIDI expression pedal), and the ability to record tempo variances (rubato, fermata, and all the little things that make human performances better than plain computer playback from a digital score) in the same way.

For these reasons, I every now and then decide to stray away and try the latest version of Finale or Sibelius, most recently the latter. I find these full-fledged music notation packages can do almost anything, except letting the user manipulate the score efficiently. Whereas in NoteWorthy, there is almost never any reason to reach for the mouse, Sibelius forces you to click all the time. In general, I find NoteWorthy’s editing model beats that of Sibelius by great margin when it comes to entering music on a single staff.

Granted, NoteWorthy’s model is very unconventional and quite weird. It regards every staff as a separate list of staff “items” (which includes notes, rests, bar lines, clefs, key signatures, and such), and editing is done word processor-style: there is a cursor which goes between staff items (unlike in Sibelius, where it seems the cursor can be either between or on an item), and the staff items behave like characters, meaning you can delete them with the backspace or delete keys, select them by moving the cursors left or right while holding down Shift, and so on. Measures work like to words, meaning you can move the cursor quickly between them via Ctrl+Left/Right. This all works extremely well for single staves, and when entering multi-staff music linearly from beginning to end. However, NoteWorthy’s editing model fails horribly if you make a mistake while editing the middle of a piece of music with multiple staves:

Notice how the error propagates to the entire rest of the piece, and how the user him/herself has to figure out where there’s a missing note and what that missing note’s duration might be. In fact, the situation above needs not even be an error: if you wanted to replace the contents of one measure in the middle of the piece, the staves would inevitably be misaligned (like above) during the editing operation. This forces the user to think very hard about editing—if you lose track of what you’re doing for just a second, it’s a pain to figure out how to realign the staves again.

Despite all of this, I find I can work so much faster in this environment than in say, Sibelius, that I’m sticking with NoteWorthy for now. But future blog posts shall reveal my glorious plans to fix all of this by writing my own music notation software (no, NoteWorthy is not open source, unfortunately)…