Ornament Playback

Hello, community.

This is a fairly trivial request compared to things like guitar tablature which is planned for the next Dorico release, but I was wondering if playback for ornaments like mordents and turns are planned for the near future? Trill playback was implemented in I think 2.2.0, but mordents, turns and the like currently don’t play back.

Thank you for reading.

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Well, if you read something like Donington’s “The interpretation of early music” - not to mention some historical sources like CPE Bach, Quantz, Leopold Mozart, etc - I’m not convinced ornament playback is “trivial” compared with guitar tab.

Playing ornaments wrong is relatively easy, but the problem is that the same sign can mean ten different things, in different contexts.

As long as we have options to select French, Italian, German, English, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic…

Just like we do for tempo markings. Oh, wait, no we don’t :wink:

Ah, I see what you mean there. I’ve read that mordents in the Baroque period could start on the “lesser” note rather than the principal note, for example, but I had forgotten that when I posted this.

We certainly do plan to make other baroque and classical ornaments play back in future, but I’m not sure it’s going to make it into our next major release, I’m afraid.

Cool. Thank you.

No, as yet only trills play back.

It’s funny I’ve managed to “fake” ornaments by placing grace notes at the start of the note and making them transparent.

Mb a nice way to deal with all kinds of ornaments is to just allow a user to enter notes and then hide them under a mordent mark. For now there are some problems with grace note playback (you need to fine-tune durations) and there are no dedicated hide/show note functionality.

+1

Any news on this?

Is that possible to playback mordents or other ornaments using script or macors?

Any help would be appreciated it.

Not at present.

I think there is a way to do it, although it does require a software with an internal sequencer, such as Vienna Instruments Pro. I am just trying out Dorico for now, but have experience with programming Articulation Sets and Expression Maps for certain software.

I’ll take VIP as an example. The idea is to save all the different ornaments inside the sequencer (e.g. WT Trill, HT Trill, WT Mordent, HT Mordent, etc.) then create custom playing techniques for all the different ornaments, assign them the corresponding symbols, and in the expression maps of dorico, select these playing techniques.

This should be working in theory. I will try this out when I find the time within the next week and can report back if there is any interest here, as my whole decision of purchasing Dorico depends on this working.

Looking forward to seeing your report, buddy!

I just tried a simplified version with trills, adding a WT and HT trill midi sequence in the VIP sequencer, and set up the expression map accordingly to select the corresponding sequence. It works.

I haven’t tried the “advanced version” with custom playing techniques yet.

For anyone who is interested: I just found the time to try this, and it works. I just created a custom mordent symbol and triggered the right sequence in the Vienna Instruments Pro sequencer.

Now I can create a custom playback for every ornament according to C.P.E. Bach’s book.

Sorry for bumping up the old thread, but is this still the situation in Dorico 3.5.12?

No change.

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I find ornaments so dependent on style, century, even on the age of the author, that I still think that realizing them with an hidden staff will be impossible to substitute, except in very simple occurrences. Turns perhaps?

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Hello dear colleagues,
Yes, the playback of the ornaments in their variations is very important. By the way glissando/portamento weren’t mentioned. Dorico 3.5.12 is still unable to properly play them.
Instead of sliding it plays the note chromatically.
For the integration of ornamentation playback some ideas could be taken from Overture 5, which provides a popping window for every ornamentation with option to choose how so it should performed.
Another missing, and very important things is the Ceasura, Fermata and breath marks customizable playback.
@dspreadbury, there is another thing that would be useful “attacca” which will provide a controllable options for jumping from one Flow to another. Currently we can control the pausing time between the flows only globally by editing some Dorico file, but we don’t have such global function in the Preferences. Attacca generally means to move from one piece to another without a pause, but due to usage of reverbs we may need to put some short amount of time between two adjacent Flows in order to preserve the impression the following piece is a new movement.
We hope to see many improvements regarding the ornaments, breath marks, fermata, ceasura… etc. in the upcoming Dorico 4! :slight_smile:
I’m sure there are a lot of expectations about Dorico 4 due to the long release gap between version 3.5.0 and 4.0.0.

Best wishes,
Thurisaz

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There will not be any significant improvements to the playback of glissandos, fermatas, breath marks, ornaments, and so on in Dorico 4, I’m afraid. I know lots of users are waiting for improvements in these areas, and we will work on them as soon as we can, but they haven’t been among the things we have chosen to focus on with our very limited development resources over this cycle. They remain high priority items for the future.

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