chord symbol playback

You accordion method has a very bad limitation. If you have a different set of instruments playing the chord, say the saxes have their clarinets, bass clarinet and flutes out, and the trumpets are muted while a trombone plays the melody you then have a totally different set of instruments than what your one button will produce. No matter what music you write, you want the instruments your writing for to play back rather than some predefined instrument set.

I would suggest an algorithm that starts at the bottom instrument on the sheet (since this is usually the lowest pitched) and select a note in the middle of its range that is the bottom of the chord. For simplicity's sake lets select a C major chord. That instrument will play the C closest to the middle of it's range. The next instrument above it on the score will play the E nearest the middle of it's range. and so on up the list of instruments. I would tell the algorithm to look for any instruments written on a grand staff and make any of those instruments play the entire chord. C on the bass staff, E on the bass staff, G at the top of the bass staff, middle C, up to E, G then C again.

This gives the freedom to the music writer to use any instrumentation he wants and does not make it sound like the same jazz band every time. I would also keep it very simple and have the instruments automatically playing 1/2 notes or the longest note possible before the next chord change or measure break.

I'm not a programmer, but I believe this would be easier than having the possibility of introducing a previously unused instrument in your static table of chord-voicings.

Lead sheets are written for a variety of instrumentations for jazz ensembles, but this feature could be used by other genres as well and should have the flexibility to be applied to any instrumentation.

Actually, I am a jazz musician and composer as well, and as such I am *very* focused on "jazz workflow". I implemented quite a lot of how chord symbol parsing and rendering works as well as slash notation and other notation features important for jazz. It is just as I said again - we have very limited resources and are focused on notation, not playback. It's not that we'd be opposed to having some sort of of rudimentary chord symbol playback; it's just that there is still too much work to do in the core notation areas for this to become a priority.

Since you are a programmer, and MuseScore is open source, feel free to contribute your skills as many of us have to improve MuseScore in the ways that are most important to you!

I would say, though, that a static table is limited in that it implies a finite list of possible chords. We don't actually have such a static list - there are a practically infinite number of legal chord symbols we can parse and understand. So it would probably be easier to generate voicings algorithmically.