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MichaelSel / edoJS

A set of functions for manipulating musical pitches within a given EDO
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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[Paper] Missing section comparing against other software packages #1

Closed napulen closed 2 years ago

napulen commented 2 years ago

This issue is related to the following review: https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/3784#event-5391142283

According to the guidelines of JOSS papers, a description of how this software compares to other commonly-used packages in this research area is missing.

I know of at least the existence of music21, which overlaps on several aspects with edo.js, and has been ported to JavaScript in the past.

Another interesting thing for this project would be to include a line or two about how it could potentially complement tools like vexflow, Verovio, or the Verovio Humdrum Viewer.

As a reviewer, I'd accept the claim that all of these tools are tangential and edo.js is the first tool of its kind (e.g., to the best of my knowledge, no other analysis library has been written in pure JavaScript), but I'd still want the section in the paper stating that.

MichaelSel commented 2 years ago

@napulen thanks so much for your comments.

I am happy to edit the paper to incorporate your comments.

My general response would be that Music21 is very much based on established music standard music theory (figured bass, roman numerals, tonality) etc. Edo.js, however, cares about very different things, namely, acoustics, mathematics, and exploratory tools for not yet established music theory (based on classic and recent music theory papers). In this respect the amount of such functions that EDO.js contains far outweighs that of music21. For instance, in an experiment we are currently conducting, we used edo.js to generate pseudo-random melodies based on customizable parameters (using https://michaelsel.github.io/edoJS/EDO_get.html#.random_melody).

But, by far, the biggest different between edo.js and any other music analysis library that I'm aware of is that while most analysis packages only operate within the context of 12-EDO (standard 12-note tuning), edo.js works by design in any tuning based on equal divisions of the octave (hence its name). I state in the first sentence of the paper, but that may not be emphasized enough.

As to vexflow and other notation packages, there's no implementation of any functions specifically designed for use with these packages. Keep in mind however that standard notation doesn't do very well with non-standard tuning.

Please let me know what you think. I'm happy to elaborate in the paper.

MichaelSel commented 2 years ago

Note that I updated the opening and concluding paragraphs of the paper

napulen commented 2 years ago

Thanks! I will check the new PDF (and lengthier discussions going on in other issues) throughout the week.

napulen commented 2 years ago

See my comments on https://github.com/MichaelSel/edoJS/issues/10