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w3c / mnx

Music Notation CG next-generation music markup proposal.
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Show or hide lyrics by verse #177

Open samuelbradshaw opened 5 years ago

samuelbradshaw commented 5 years ago

This issue applies especially to church singing of hymns, but may apply in other situations as well. When singing a hymn with several verses, it's common that only certain verses are sung, due to time, or if certain verses are only applicable to a special occasion, etc. The music leader will generally announce which verses are to be sung, or have the verse numbers written in a printed program.

In a digital application, if the congregation will only sing (for example) verses 1, 2, and 5, it should be possible to hide the other verses to make it more clear which verses will be sung. Hiding verses may also make it easier for a piano or organ accompanist to play a hymn if the right and left hands are separated by 7 or 8 verses of lyrics – the app the accompanist is reading sheet music from could hide the lyrics entirely, or maybe show 2–3 verses at a time, and cycle through them as they're being sung.

Is showing or hiding a verse of lyrics already possible in MusicXML?

hymn-verses-all hymn-verses-some

mdgood commented 5 years ago

MusicXML let you hide lyrics one individual lyric syllable at a time by using the <lyric print-object="no"> element. There is nothing to hide an entire verse at a time. The application would need to search for the appropriate number and/or name attributes in the lyric elements.

mdgood commented 5 years ago

This seems like a good issue to consider for MNX-Common, rather than addressing in a future MusicXML version.

samuelbradshaw commented 4 years ago

Additional thoughts transferred from w3c/musicxml/issues/327: In MusicXML, lyrics are closely tied to parts. Ideally, a solution in MNX would allow lyrics to be independent from parts, which would allow showing and hiding them independently to be more intuitive. (Though there might still be cases where lyrics being connected to parts is desirable.)