Musician Profiles - quick access to relevant parts, voice types, scores, etc.
Imagine you play an instrument (e.g. trumpet) and sing a certain voice type (e.g 2nd soprano). You want to find music for your instrument and voice type. Perhaps you play in an orchestra and/or sing in a choir. You want find music for your group, and you want to be able to quickly extract your instrument's part, or listen to your voice part on its own.
Introducing Musician Profiles...
Your Musician Profile would just be a section of your user profile on MuseScore.com which lists the instruments you play, and perhaps a little bit of information about your note range and level of ability with each instrument. This could affect everything from your MuseScore.com search results to the default Mixer settings in MuseScore and the MuseScore apps.
For Instruments
For example, if you add the "Trumpet" instrument to your Musician Profile, then you could expect the following things to happen:
- On MuseScore.com - scores with a trumpet would (optionally) appear first in search results, followed by scores for instruments similar to a trumpet (which are probably playable on a trumpet).
- In the MuseScore desktop program - the trumpet part would be extracted from orchestral scores automatically.
- In the MuseScore app - the trumpet part would (by default) be the only instrument displayed in orchestral scores.
A more complex implementation could allow you to specify the range of notes you are able to reach on the trumpet, and your level of ability (beginner/intermediate/advanced) or ABRSM grade, and have the search results filtered to only include scores which you can actually play.
For Voice Types
If you add "Voice" as an instrument to your Musician Profile, you would be asked a series of questions:
- My comfortable range is: (e.g. A3 - A5)
- My maximum range is: (e.g. F3 - C5)
Note: the following questions could be auto-filled based on the above answers. - In choral pieces, I usually sing music written for which gender?
- Male
- Female*
*Assume the user picks this option.
- When the female chorus splits into two, I usually sing which part?
- Soprano (the upper part)*
- Alto (the lower part)
- Soprano (the upper part)
- Mezzo (the middle part)*
- Alto (the lower part)
- 1st Soprano (the highest part)
- 2nd Soprano (the upper-middle part)*
- 1st Alto (the lower-middle part)
- 2nd Alto (the lowest part)
(Male singers would be asked the corresponding questions for Tenor, Baritone & Bass voice types)
Based on the user's answers to the questions above, you could expect the following things to happen:
- On MuseScore.com - scores for your voice type would (optionally) appear first in search results, followed by scores for other voice types (which can be transposed).
- In the MuseScore desktop program - there would be an option to mute, solo, or emphasise your voice type during playback of choral scores (think of this as a macro to quickly change Mixer settings).
- In the MuseScore app - your voice part would (by default) be the only instrument displayed in choral scores, and the Mixer would have the same mute/solo/emphasise option as in the desktop program.
Ideally the mute/solo/emphasise option would also be available in the MuseScore.com player.
For Groups
There could also be an option to specify that you play or sing in a group, and to provide some information about this group (e.g. how many players/singers, which instruments/voice types, what level of ability) and have search results filtered to show scores that are suitable for your group.
Even better would be the ability to create a MuseScore.com group for your local orchestra/choir, create a MuseScore.com profile for each member, and then add them to the group!
Comments
You are full of great ideas, shoogle!
I can imagine this would increase musescore.com usage and userbase.
In reply to You are full of great ideas, by ericfontainejazz
Thanks! I try. ;)
Regarding filtering by "difficulty", "difficulty" is a bit qualitative. Of course instrument "range" is a simple measure an aspect of difficulty. But other difficulty aspects like how "fast" is the music or how "complicated" are the rhythms are harder to qualify. Would such things be qualified by each composer, or automatically?
In reply to Regarding filtering by by ericfontainejazz
At first it would probably be a property that the uploader would set (like choosing a license), or perhaps something that people could vote on (like a rating). An algorithm could be developed to consider tempo, rhythm, range, key signature and so on, or an Artificial Intelligence could be trained to give a rating.
But like I said, I would leave this out of the initial implementation. I'm more interested in discussing the things we know are possible, like linking the Musician Profile to the Mixer within MuseScore. I was only suggesting the difficulty filter as something that might become possible eventually.
This is a very ambitious undertaking. You can see what ACMP came up with over many years when they tried to get their members to self assess their skills (now called "playing levels"): https://acmp.net/join-acmp/acmp-guide-playing-levels
I'd say this is pretty vague and allows hugely differing "grades" for one person depending on choice of priorities but it is hugely better than what they had before IMHO.
The idea to differentiate by instrument / voice type is probably a step to make individual ratings more reliable than the above example so I would support that even though it adds another layer of complication. But since this project is so complicated I'd like to know precisely what it attempts to accomplish, how it helps a user search the database. Do you assume people publish only music they themselves can play?
In reply to This is a very ambitious by azumbrunn
Sorry, I don't really want to discuss the difficulty rating system here, but here's another thread where it is being discussed: https://musescore.org/en/node/138516
As I said to @ericfontainejazz, I don't see the difficulty rating as being an important part of this feature request. (I probably shouldn't have mentioned it at all.) I know it would be very difficult to get right, unlike the other aspects of Musician Profiles which I think are perfectly achievable.
I certainly do not assume people publish music they can play. Many people publish arrangements and transcriptions of very complex pieces precisely because they cannot play it and want to hear how it sounds.