Re: Support articulations, slurs and breaths in MIDI (issue 26470047)

[Devon Schudy]

address@hidden wrote:
> If you say "overlap is the one synthesizers recognize": does that
> mean that there needs to be a physical gap, or is it sufficient if
> the note-on command of the next note comes before the note-off
> command of the previous note in the MIDI data, without any
> intervening time gap?

I think the MIDI command just has to arrive later, but this is a
slightly obscure feature, so actual synthesizers might do something
else.

However, this is probably irrelevant, because synthesizers recognize
overlap only if legato/portamento mode is on — and it usually isn't on
by default, because it misinterprets chords. So the slurry sound of
overlapping notes is just due to overlapping sound, not to special
synthesizer support. Maybe Lilypond could emit the command to turn on
portamento mode when there are no chords; I haven't tried this.

Slur overlap doesn't improve the sound nearly as much as
articulations, and breaks midi roundtripping, and the current
implementation is ad-hoc, so maybe it shouldn't be included.

How does the parser create slurs? They seem to be post-events, but I
don't see where they're defined. It would be more flexible to do slurs
with a perform-length property on the SlurEvent, and that would
generalize to other spanners.