Tie notes - How can we implement this with smplr?

[naushad-jamil]

Let's say an app wants to play a series of notes (pitch, duration) using an instrument in smplr. Plain and simple. It works.
e.g. C4,0.5 D4,1 etc.

What if we have a series of notes but there are some tie notes. e.g.
C4,0.5 tied C4,1

Here we don't want to play two different C4 the first one 0.5 and the second one 1 but we want to continue the C4,0.5 note and extend it by another 1s.

Of course we can simply pass it as C4,1.5. This is possible to do in my parser but the logic will be convoluted as I have to do look ahead and remove notes from future measures and bring them to the current measure. It will be ugly.

Another idea - is to cancel the previous note and reschedule another C4 with 1.5s duration with smplr. Is there a way to cancel a scheduled note and reschedule it?

Is there a more straight forward approach to achieve tied notes?

[danigb]

Hi @naushad-jamil

There's no way to cancel and reschedule notes, so I'd say that look ahead and remove notes is the simplest option I can think of.

[naushad-jamil]

@drscottlobo - Hello Scott. Thank you so much for taking the trouble to put together a snippet. Really appreciate it. In my original post I said
"Of course we can simply pass it as C4,1.5. This is possible to do in my parser but the logic will be convoluted as I have to do look ahead and remove notes from future measures and bring them to the current measure. It will be ugly."

This is exactly what I was referring to. That is look ahead and bring the duration to the current note in an iterative fashion.

My only problem with this approach is this -

Imagine I have UI notes editor. It is a sequence of measures/bars. I was hoping to highlight each bar (each note inside each bar would be an added bonus) as the player is playing the notes of. Imagine a 4/4 notation. bar 1's last quarter note is tied with bar 2's first quarter note. How will I highlight bar 2 when the player is playing the tied note that falls in bar 2?

That would be my challenge with this approach.

Please let me know if you have any idea.

I thank you however, for showing me the onStart() and onEnded() callbacks. I didn't know they existed. I am sure I can make good use of them.

Again - Thanks a ton!

P.S.
I tested the onStart() and onEnded() hooks with console.log(). They surely are fired but all the onStart() ones execute first followed by the End ones. It seems perhaps all the notes continue to play and do not end after the duration value.

[drscottlobo]

I'd suggest moving away from organizing your music data by measure. Measures are just a visual aspect of the music, they don't have any effect on what we hear, so you might want to decouple your visual logic from your playback logic.

But, perhaps rather than skipping that part of the loop like I did, you could add a tag called isSkipped, so the note doesn't play back but it does have a way of highlighting the correct bar with onStart.

[naushad-jamil]

Thank you for your input. Agreed they don't have any relation with what we hear but measures because they are modular and small units help us to work in small chunks for learning. And we were only talking about the challenges of visual aspects here. The playback needs to provide a way so we can track measures. Any DAW or music playing software such as musescore they show note by note, measure by measure visually.

Even when you suggested highlighting the note being played - if the note's duration is borrowing duration from future measures and that note is highlighted conceptually it is incorrect when the tied note in the next measure is being played.

I think I may be able to figure out some logic to get his done. By the way any idea why the onStart() functions all gets executed first then the onEnded() ones?

[naushad-jamil]

Hi @danigb and @drscottlobo thanks for your input/ideas with my quest here. I was able to figure out a solution to highlight my measures as they are being played. For now since no other method is known I am using the look ahead notes from current and future measures for tied notes and bring the duration from them to current note but I am scheduling callbacks for each measure as I am scheduling the playback notes by computing how long each measure should take. If there are no lags etc. in playing I think this should work fine. I did some quick testing and it seems to be working fine.