Questions about "Flows" and other nonstandard terms

Yes. I have mentioned it in two or three other posts, that the german translation sometimes creates confusion.

segment = Segment. Is the same and means the same. This term would be more useful than »Partie« (which means »opera role« but is the replacement for »flow«).

After reading all the comments, I think, that its noble and intelligent of the Dorico team to use DTP terms. Projcet, flow, frame, master page, … are all »containers« which we can fill with what we call music (or not :wink: ). So on the long run I hope that Dorico gets much more of well established DTP features: magnetic layout, hyphenation, text flow, rulers, …
I also think, when it comes to proper engraving, every user of a notation program (doesn’t matter if its Finale, Sibelius, Dorico, whatever) has to be able to deal with DTP in some way. So …

Folks - stop trying to put musical meaning into the word Flow. It’s just a grouping of typographic information. The way Dorico works those pieces (Frames) flow together. That’s it. Don’t put any musical meaning into it, Flow means something only in the context of what it happens to contain. Thats it, move on :smiley:

+1

I’m not sure that “flow” is used as a noun in many DTP applications. Most DTP users would be familiar with text flowing around images, or flowing from one page to another, or a river flowing into a sea, but “flow” meaning a chunk of something is new, isn’t it?

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who flourished around 500 B.C., puts it best. One of his famous aphorisms is “πάντα ῥεῖ,” which translates into English as “all things flow.” Clearly he anticipates by a millennium-and-a-half the choice of the Dorico team, although he would have no idea at the time what confusion this might cause in German or any other future European language.

(tongue firmly planted in one of the pouches on the inside of my mouth)

There really is no word that can truly suffice - if they used an existing term, it would be wrong, as the concept of the program does things beyond the term itself; on the other hand finding a new term is equally problematic, as it doesn’t signify anything recognizable. Circular issue.

I will admit that the term Flow had a bit of a new-age feel to it. I got over it. As it is a new application, and in a way, a new concept, a new term is on order. Wonder how we’ll feel in 10 years?

That is exactly the info many of us need! A “Flow” is “just a grouping of typographic information,” free from any musical meaning.

Otherwise we can’t help but assume that “Flow” must have some musical meaning for Dorico, because as musicians trying to notate music, music is naturally our frame of reference.

What the documentation does not currently tell us is that we need to change our frame of reference, and that the proper frame of reference for typesetting music in Dorico is not music but rather desktop publishing.

Unless this is spelled out to us, there’s no way we can know we have to reframe the concept, and by default our minds automatically keep trying in vain to define “Flows” from a musical frame of reference, and as a result Dorico becomes “too hard.”

aef110, you’ve made your point multiple times already. I’ve said that I’ll make a note to look at amending the explanations of flows in the manual to include a reference to this, if on reflection is seems suitable and helpful. You don’t need to request this any further, I feel like I’ve understood your point well already. It is always useful to know where some users would like additional clarification, so thank you for sharing your thoughts.

However, I would gently suggest that actually understanding “why” they’re called flows isn’t strictly necessary to be able to use Dorico, nor should you need to change your frame of reference at all. Unless you add additional flows to a project, it works in a way very similar to other notation softwares: a single continuous piece of music. In that situation, knowing that Dorico calls that a “flow” is probably not that important to you as a user either. The existing introduction to flows explains what flows are (“separate spans of music”), how flows work, and how you might use them in some musical contexts. Again, I’ve made a note to review this topic to see if there’s any additional information that would be useful to users.

I would be hesitant to encourage users to think of Dorico in terms other than a notation software: that is its primary purpose, it is geared to be musically semantic, hence how it handles e.g. dynamics (text and hairpins all the same category). It simply allows you to include multiple separate bits of music in one project and display them in clever ways, if you so choose. If you just want to have five pieces one after the other, you in theory wouldn’t need to change anything from the defaults at all.

(After re-reading your initial post, I wonder if this article might be of interest to you: Steinberg announces Dorico; availability in Q4 2016 - Scoring Notes)

Thanks, Lillie, and sorry—didn’t mean to beat a dead horse. I was just trying to understand the concepts and reply to the many helpful responses from everyone.

Yes, the article you linked to that explains the choice of the word “flows” and desktop publishing is very helpful—that’s really exactly what I was looking for.

I think what’s confusing to me is that I’m both unfamiliar with desktop publishing and that there isn’t a general, overarching musical term that encompasses pieces, movements, and all the other things flows can be. As a musician rather than a typesetter, I have to remind myself that how music is structured isn’t necessarily the same thing as how it looks on the page. With everyone’s kind explanations, I think I’ll now be able to work with Dorico much better.

The idea that “flow” is a word used in (or comes from) desktop publishing feels like a red herring to me. It doesn’t help me make any sense of what they are, or what they’re used for.

For me, in Dorico, a flow is a chunk of music. That definition works for me, maybe it will help others.

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This is very much what I wanted to say. I wasn’t aware that “flow” came from desktop publishing, and now that I’ve learned it I have no intention of retaining the knowledge, as that doesn’t matter to my use of Dorico. I understood from my first use of Dorico that “flow” was a generic term encompassing whatever chunks my project might comprise: a movement, an aria, a hymn, a song, a test item, a musical example. A new coinage, as far as I was aware, helpfully designed to welcome all kinds of multi-part musical creations.

Uh… 2 and a half millennia?

Seriously, in my opinion, in English “flow” is a great generic term for this purpose. It takes awhile to grasp all of Dorico’s concepts, as it’s a very powerful application. You have to allow yourself time to absorb the power of this wonderful tool – designed from the very beginning, not stuck on like a bandaid. I’m glad I had some exposure to InDesign, because there are some nice similarities.

Music?

For me, flows are just containers. On their own, they’re characterless to the extent that they really don’t need defining. It’s what you fill them up with (Music) and how you present them (Master Pages / Flow Headers) that makes them unique.

This whole discussion encapsulates my experience with the Dorico documentation. Usually, I know what I want to do, but when I try to look it up, I cant find it. This is invariably because I do not know the buzzword being used by Dorico. I have wasted a lot of time in searches for quite simple information.

While I applaud the creators of Dorico for re-inventing the wheel in many areas, the use of terminology to describe the operation of the program that is different from that used by convention in Sibelius and Finale is not one of them. For me that is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

While Dorico has pioneered many improvements, the invention of new names for features (without ensuring that all users are up to speed with the new vocabulary) is not among them.

David

What more – apart from providing detailed definitions in the introduction to the Help Pages, video demonstrations and tutorials, and a constant presence on the forums – would you have them do?

Finale and Sibelius don’t have the concept of Flows, no matter what name. And they are not without terms of their own invention, either.

Sorry to hear this David - do you have a few examples of things you searched for that you can share? I’ve tried to spend time in the last year or so particularly embedding keywords that use alternate terms that I’ve either seen users use to describe what they want to achieve or are just simply a useful alternative.

It’s always good to know where specifically this can be improved, as although I try to give real use-case examples that add related words that might come up in searches, we do have to be somewhat restricted in our language for both consistency and translation considerations (in particular, not all synonyms in English exist in other languages, which can cause problems) so there is a limit to what I can include in the body of topics. You’ll often find synonyms or alternates in the index, such as “measure - see bars” and “page break - see frame break”.

You think Dorico is tough? You need to get out more often :smiley: For my game company I’ve had to master 3D art, game development and of course sound design and digital composition. My god Dorico is the easiest of the bunch. We’ve gone through a workflow changeover, let’s see what tools I had to master the last year alone

  • Blender
  • Quixel Mixer & Bridge
  • Marmoset toolbag
  • Unreal Engine 4.5
  • Perforce
  • Logic
  • Dorico
  • About 10 different plugins to the art workflow

Hell man, I had to drop Logic finally in favor of Cubase because of a 16 voice MIDI limitation, I did that in one day - yesterday!

So sorry, I don’t buy it, don’t harass the Dorico team, they (and Quixel) are the most supportive I’ve seen, and the terminology in Dorico is nothing to get worked up about. Documentation? Piffle, it’s great, but you can only lead a horse to water.

n.b. Not trying to start a flame war on this wonderful forum, or get anybody’s feathers ruffled, but I think we need some perspective here.

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Voice: "A single melodic line or part in polyphonic music, as in a four-voice fugue…(Harvard Dictionary of Music 2003)

Just because several simultaneous notes are now stemmed together for convenience (in earlier times, they often weren’t) doesn’t make them a single “voice.” “Harmony” is the vertical conjunction of different “voices”. A harmony is not a voice.

But that was in earlier times. Now I can’t tell a student to bring out the “top voice” because the term has lost precision and they might think I mean a whole chord.

Look at the last two bars of the Bach G minor fugue from Book 1 of the WTC, in any edition from Czerny (~1850) onwards.

The Harvard Dictionary would indicate that that is a four voice fugue, not a five voice fugue, right?

It seems to me that this particular ship sailed long before DTP software came along with “layers”.

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:laughs: Hey, I was only off by a thousand years. Greek philosophy will do that to you!

Thanks for the clearly needed correction.