Accent not playing with expressive sound
In the attached score (which uses the MuseScore_General_HQ soundfont), the first note of each eighth note pair is accented. When playing with a non-expressive sound (like "Flute"), I can hear the accent in the playback. But when I play with an expressive sound (like "Flute Expr."), all of the eighth notes sound the same. Is there a misconfiguration on my end, or is this intrinsic in how the expressive sounds work? Thanks.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Accent with Expressive sound.mscz | 4.45 KB |
Comments
It's supposed to work, and indeed, it only work to use the expr sound for flute, since the staff itself is set to use single note dynamics. And it works fine for other expr sounds. Could be the flute one is off, maybe it's there but too subtle?
In reply to It's supposed to work, and… by Marc Sabatella
Based on your note I started looking at waveforms, showing expr and non-expr traces both with and without accents. When using flute expr (attached), you can see that there is a minor increase in amplitude at the start of the accented note, but it's very small. The amplitude difference on the non-expressive flute sound is much more significant.
I also tried other instruments, including violin, oboe, harmonica, and square lead - in all of these cases (at least for me), the expr sound renders the accent much less than the non-expr sound. Of this set, square lead (also attached) gave the closest match between the sound difference between expr and non-expr.
So based on this, it looks like accents are being rendered in expr sounds, even if it doesn't sound like it. Which leads to the next obvious questions:
(1) How to make the accent more pronounced while retaining expressive sounds?
(2) Would you expect this difference to remain when moving to MU4 (either when using soundfonds or with the new orchestral library)?
Thanks -
In reply to Based on your note I started… by mdeluca
It's correct that expr instruments don't overdo accents the way non-expr ones do (see piano for the worst offender). The correct interpretation of the accent should be a harder attack followed immediately by a return to a normal volume - very much like an "fp". But non-expr sounds are incapable of that sort of subtlety - they are just loud for the duration of the note, which is not correct for wind instruments.
Now, the actual amount of the increase in initial attack is something that it would be nice to be able to customize someday, as indeed, it's too little for flute for sure. While to me other wind instruments sound reasonable, it's subjective for sure, and there might be situations where you do want a more pronounced attack. A new framework for defining behavior of articulations is being built into MuseScore 4. It's not clear exactly when the actual controls for this will be added to the UI, though. It might happen before the release of 4.0, but it also might be sometime afterward.
In reply to It's correct that expr… by Marc Sabatella
Thanks for the clear explanation of how this has been set up, and a view into possible changes here going forward.