Early music notation
I've just been familiarising myself with the early music notation features in musescore, and it seems to me that there are still a few major features missing.
1) Note heads; considering that often people refer to medieval notation as "square notes" it seems strange that in the note heads palette you can choose diamond or rectangular note heads, but not square.
2) To have a palette of rhythmic notation symbols (punctum, podatus, clivis, torculus, porrectus ...) is absolutely essential for early music notation.
3) Clefs: the most common clefs in medieval notation are the Do (2 small square or diamond note heads joined with a stem on the left to resemble a C) and Fa (the same thing with another note head between them to the left of the stem and the stem extended a little below). It would be great to have those clefs included and to be able to place them on any line on the stave.
Is there currently any way of doing any of this, and if not, would it be possible to include them as new features?
Comments
You have a lot of symbols for medieval and renaissance periods in Special Characters (Ctrl + T + F2), "Musical symbols" tab.
![clef.jpg]( "clef.jpg")
![musical.jpg]( "musical.jpg")
You can resize these symbols and put then in a palette (custom workspace needed) for later reusing.
In reply to You have a lot of symbols… by cadiz1
Oh yes, so you can. Thank you very much. There's almost always a work around if you know where to look. Maybe the problem is with the search engine in the handbook; if I type "Medieval" I don't find all that.
In reply to Oh yes, so you can. Thank… by s c standen
Here's a suggestion:
If you (or anyone else) can't find a page and someone directs you to a handbook page, feel free to add to the "Contextual help tags" that you see near the bottom of the page when you put it in Edit mode. You do this by clicking the 3 dots to the right of the title and click Edit. You can then add key words you searched to make it easier for the next person to find the page.
In reply to Here's a suggestion:… by mike320
You can't add keywords there, just pick from a list, which consists of MuseScore elements and will bring up the page when that element is selected in MuseScore and F1 gets pressed.
In reply to You can't add keywords there… by Jojo-Schmitz
:(
It looked like the same field as when you upload a score and can add multiple search terms to your score separated by commas.
In reply to You have a lot of symbols… by cadiz1
?!?!!! What is the keystroke or command to access this on the Mac?
In reply to ?!?!!! What is the keystroke… by [DELETED] 1831606
Same as on other systems - F2, while editing text. Or just click the icon at the left of the text editing toolbar/
This is the "Special Characters" palette, basically the same symbols as on the "Symbols" palette ("Z" to display) but as characters to be incorporated into text rather than standalone symbols.
In reply to Same as on other systems -… by Marc Sabatella
Thanks; didn't know that. Most of the entries in the obscure categories in all the three sub-menus have glyphs representing inability to represent the character. I realize how difficult it would be to solve this properly, but those categories are less than useful in that state. Perhaps this dialog should have a dropdown for the user to choose the font, hoping that he or she knows more about the state of fonts on the system than the app does. Anyway, this is still very useful (have been using Mac Characters/Emojis facility (Cmd+Ctrl+Space) to enter flats, naturals, etc in text).
In reply to Thanks; didn't know that. … by [DELETED] 1831606
Hmm, all the glyphs under Common Symbols and Musical Symbols should be there if you have a correct installation - the symbols come from Emmentaler Text or Bravura Text fonts in most cases. Maybe you have an incompatible version of those font installed on your system for some reason? Remove them and all should be well - MuseScore needs to be able to access its own internal version. The "Unicode" tab, well, that's up to whatever font you are actually using for your text at the time,
In reply to Hmm, all the glyphs under… by Marc Sabatella
No, the music stuff is OK. I was talking about unusual areas of the Unicode space. While indeed you can use those if the font in your text at the time supports them, the dialog itself can't display them, and there is no way to control the font(s) it uses.
In reply to No, the music stuff is OK. I… by [DELETED] 1831606
It uses the font of the text you are editing itself. That is, whatever is set as the font in Text Style (or perhaps overridden in Text Properties), that is what it uses for displaying the characters in that dialog.
For instance, try right click a title, Text Properties, setting it to some distinctive font, then double-clicking the text and pressing F2. You'll see that font used in the Unicode section.
In reply to You have a lot of symbols… by cadiz1
Where can I find that voice "Special Characters"?
In reply to Where can I find that voice … by tomtomtoth1
See: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/entering-and-editing-text#special-c…
But getting back to the original question, these special characters would presumably have to be inserted as text? I'm talking about replacing the actual notes with 'square' notation, as in original medieval manuscripts. It would be ridiculous to expect playback of this notation, because interpretation of these manuscripts is so subjective, but to be able to realise a score using this system, without relying on long-winded workarounds would be great. I believe there are some programmes which are specifically designed to do this, but it would be well worth incorporating it into musescore.
In reply to But getting back to the… by s c standen
I agree that ancient music notation is in need of improvement in MuseScore. As far as playback is concerned, there could be some arbitrary default tempo with the user having the option of changing this as always. Since the notes, as is actually the case still today, are relative to one another the tempo entered by the user would affect the actual durations of the entered notes.
In reply to I agree that ancient music… by mike320
OK, as this was officially supposed to be a feature request, may I implore anyone interested (and particularly anyone who has the technical know-how to programme a MuseScore plug-in for neume notation) to take a look at this page in order to get an idea of how it could be done. There's probably little point in re-inventing the wheel. If I knew how to do this, I would.
http://www.cantigasdesantamaria.com/neumatsamples.html
You might have to get in touch with the guy in order to find out if this is copyrighted or whatever, or if he's happy to let it be incorporated into MuseScore; I don't know how all this sort of stuff works.
Hi, I am glad to know there is the possibility to work with square notation. It's great!. The one question I can not try the voice "Special caracters" where can I look for? I have the last Musescore 4.2
Thank for your help
In reply to Hi, I am glad to know there… by tomtomtoth1
In a text field, single-click twice (separated!) at the point you wish to add a special character. Then open the Properties tab (upper left). In the Text section, you'll find Insert special characters near the bottom, immediately below Alignment and above Show more.