Since Noteperformer’s update to v.5.0, I keep encountering a weird issue concerning dynamics in legato phrases: During playback, Noteperformer seems to generate dynamic “swells” on every single note connected to a legato phrase via slur or legato playing technique (although I keep running into this issue with tenuto markings as well). In consequence, legato playback sounds completely off as phrases loose their smooth coherent quality and start to sound in a “wahwah” kind of way. I did observe that this behaviour seems to intensify in the context of dynamic changes like crescendo and diminuendo, and vary depending on the instrument.
For the moment, I don’t see any way of solving this problem - I did some experiments with different playing techniques, I changed the values concerning standard legato note length in Noteperformer’s expression map (which did seem to have an influence on the swells, yet only when changed to a percentage that makes the performance decidedly less “legato”)… I suspect that this issue might be connected to the “minor adjustments made to legato expression” note in the Noteperformer 5.0 Version History, yet I didn’t find any specification as to what exactly these changes were.
Did someone here encounter the same problem? I found a thread describing the same issue in a Sibelius forum on facebook, unfortunately unsolved.
Any help is much appreciated - I am starting to lose my mind over this.
there has always been a bit of a swell in NotePerfomer as it’s trying to reproduce natural phrasing but it’s true that in v. 5, this seems noticeably more marked and exaggerated than before. Did you try disabling the pitch contour emphasis in Dorico’s playback settings? This setting is not overwritten by NP’s own Expression Map and it leads to Dorico subtly changing the dynamic according to pitch phrasing. If it’s really a problem, you can always revert to v 4.5.1 (which is what many of us did so unfortunately I can no longer test this directly). I know from other libraries that this sort of inbuilt swell-on-note behaviour can be frustrating when not done in a musical manner.
Pitch contour emphasis is not activated in the project; I did test it anyway but there seems to be no correlation to the issue. I also did some more experimenting with NP’s playing techniques and found that there seems to be a difference between a slur and a “legato” marking regarding the swelling: Slurs will make all notes perform a swell, “legato” markers only those connected to a cresc. / dim. marking. Since playback note lengths differ between slurs and legato playing technique, I assume that note length might have something to do with it. Bearing in mind though that NP’s reading of playback note length (especially when edited in playback mode) can be a bit weird and unpredictable sometimes, I made the decision to let the issue rest for now and go back to v.4.5.1 :’) I intend to keep my hopes up though, maybe a future update will bring some enlightenment to this matter.