> A related issue for kern encoding of piano music broadly is whether the third or fourth staff should really be encoded as a third or fourth spine. In the case of piano music, the third or fourth staff is really a type of subspine, and not a spine in the same way that it would be in trio or quartet music. It might be more appropriate to create a new spine locally ad hoc in the kern file, rather than having a global spine that is mostly unused except for whole rests.
But MEI and MusicXML cannot represent such things, so it is difficult to determine how to implement in a converter (other than adding lots of invisible rests for when the part is not present). Don't try in VHV as it will crash the webpage :-)
There is a way of doing this in Humdrum:
But MEI and MusicXML cannot represent such things, so it is difficult to determine how to implement in a converter (other than adding lots of invisible rests for when the part is not present). Don't try in VHV as it will crash the webpage :-)
Originally posted by @craigsapp in https://github.com/humdrum-tools/verovio-humdrum-viewer/issues/829#issuecomment-1677290078