Figured bass and music xml
As a keyboard player who is working to achieve advanced continuo playing skills, I am constantly having to devise strategies to further develop and improve my realisation of figured bass lines. The books on the market are either basic or wholly theoretical. The most difficult figured basses are those written by J.S. Bach and I have plenty of those, but I need to practise them in all keys, because expert continuo playing requires immediate intepretation by the brain of figures in terms of hand positions.
Here’s the problem: I can scan in and digitise a copy of the music I want to play, so that I can then get the notation programme (e.g. Musescore) to transpose it into all the different keys. But none of the scanning programmes available recognises the figures - they leave them out or mix them up or put them in the wrong position. The only solution is to scan the music to pdf, erase the figures, digitise the pdf, and then create a master copy in the original key by typing in the figures. As it happens, MuseScore has an excellent capability for typing in figures - it’s easy to understand and simple to carry out, but in a long score it’s still laborious.
Why is it that music scanning software cannot digitise the figures into music xml so that they can be recognised by a notati0n programme such as MuseScore?
Comments
To be honest, I would be surprised to find a OMR program that handled unrealized figured bass since it is not very common in modern music and has not been common in over 300 years. I don't discount the voluminous number score that exist with figured bass, but this is not the most common feature expected in OMR.
I do agree, MuseScore has done a very good job of making adding figured bass a simple process. There is a difficulty in interpreting text as different types of text in OMR. There are other types of text that can appear in the same spot as figured bass. OMR programs probably scan it in as some other type of text. I wonder how difficult it would be to allow the user the select a group of text and change the type of text it is in MuseScore. You can change the style in the inspector, but the original type of text persists. So, for example, you can change Lyrics to figured bass text style, but MuseScore still says it's Lyrics when you select it. This makes editing it almost impossible without deleting it and reentering it.
IMHO, the bottom line is that "early music" is a niche area with little chance to influence the "big market out there" and whose practitioners are accustomed to solve their problems DIY rather than requesting greater support. In the end, nobody cares...
(And, incidentally, thanks for your appreciation of how input of FB figures works: when I implemented it, I tried to arrive at a system simple, consistent and which anybody with some knowledge of the field could quickly grasp).
mike320 is right in pointing out that where FB figures usually are, an OMR software expects other kinds of textual data (dynamics, lyrics, ...); but it is exceedingly rare that a bass part had both figures and dynamics and the (figured or not) bass part is usually the same stave along the whole piece and usually the bottom-most. It would not be very complex to allow the user to mark one stave (or by default the bottom stave) as Continuo and trigger a different recognition process on that stave; and different only to an extent: numbers and accidentals should already be known and the 'odd' signs (slashed figured and so on) are about a dozen ("tasto solo" being the odd ball...).
Missing the veeeery occasional dynamics would be a fair price to pay for having the continuo figures recognized.
You may try to contact the author of Audiveris to see if he would be interested in adding this functionality to the programme.
(Also incidentally, the period of 'eclipse' of the FB from printed scores is long-ish, but so long: Haydn still used the concept of continuo (occasionally, true) and the recovery of earlier scores at the beginning of the XIX c. -- the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe being just one example -- sets the 'eclipse' to about half century from the end of XVIII c. to the of beginning of the XIX c.)
In reply to IMHO, the bottom line is… by Miwarre
I did put a typo in my comment. I said 300 years and should have typed 200 years. I am very aware that the Baroque style, and figured bass, did not die out until around the year 1800.
In reply to I did put a typo in my… by mike320
Figured bass never “died out”. Even after composers stopped writing it into their scores, and basso continuo realisation at the keyboard was no longer practised, it continued to be used in conservatoires as a written exercise. From the middle of the 20th century there was a revival of harpsichord playing and increasing interest in historically informed performance, including playing from a figured bass line. It is true that continuo playing is a “niche” activity, but the same could be said for most areas of classical music. No serious student of classical music theory can get away without an understanding of figured bass. In fact it is now also a component of harmonic analysis, and I make the assumption that music scanning software has the same weakness when it comes to recognising the symbols for chordal analysis.