I’m going to add another voice to this thread. “Humanization” will of course never replace actual performance but, it can mean the difference between something feeling completely synthetic and totally inspiring. This has significant workflow implications, equally as relevant as the beauty and form of high-quality engraving. In fact, if we take a step back, everything Dorico does to support “notation” is really about “humanization,” which is to say the features are all designed to help a person craft very specific and intentional visual output for another person:
- a beautiful piece of art
- an educationally focused set of practices or examples
- a score
- a lead sheet
- a reduction of popular songs for intermediate guitar players
The point here is that it’s all about being intentional, providing a specific message and experience for the reader, or in other words, expressing our humanity or dare I say “humanizing” the written output as much as possible. Why? Because it will be experienced by a human so those little details really make a difference, those details are the difference. Can we agree that output riddled with mechanical constraints and artifacts of a computer is far less palatable than the deliberate work of a person? If not, Dorico would have no user base, or certainly a much smaller set of features that aren’t directly tied to efficient writing.
How does this relate to playback? The answer is workflow. If Dorico is nothing more than a tool to notate music you already know or are given from another musician or midi file, it’s notation focus is spot on. If, however, Dorico intends to be a tool for writing music there is far more at stake. Notation is critical for communication… but maybe not the most critical element for writing. Consider the diversity of writing styles:
- Some musicians will write John Williams style and need nothing more than staves and a piano, or maybe not even a piano…
- Others require, or prefer, a high degree of experimentation, discovery or malleability while writing…
- Some rely deeply on emotion, intuition and “feeling” the music in real-time at the highest possible fidelity…
What we see here is a range of feedback requirements. While John Williams needs only visual feedback, an understudy may need audible pitches from time to time, but not in every bar as most music is still heard internally. These folks don’t need so much aural feedback because they can already hear the live, and very human, orchestra playing in all its glory and imperfection. For them, perhaps Dorico is only a tool of efficiency.
But further down the line is someone that needs to hear a pitch in every bar, and someone that needs to hear harmony, someone that needs to hear rhythm, someone needing to hear the contrast of multiple instruments played together, until you finally get to the writers that need to experience near-human performance before they can liberate the music inside them… should these writers be forced to the piano roll? Nay! Much of this workflow is fairly well covered in Dorico already, consider the feature support: custom VSTs, expression maps, automation lanes, note offsets, but why? Why provide audible feedback and tooling if not to support those whose workflows require more than “notation?” The answer is that Dorico aspires to be more than an exceptional notation tool, it aspires to be an exceptional writing tool. Notation is just the anchor (see below).
Now, before you think I’ve swung the pendulum too far let’s acknowledge that every good product has a degree of focus and constraint. Let’s call this an “anchor”. We can generally say that Bitwig and Abelton Live have anchors in electronic and live production, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them for orchestration. And Cubase is anchored in recording, but can still make effective midi mockups. So yes, Dorico’s anchor is notation, it won’t aspire to be the next leading notationless DAW and its workflows will always cater to notation-based goals. Nobody is arguing this. A plea to improve aural workflows takes nothing away from the kingdom where notation is king. These expanded borders actually enlarge the kingdom and further glorify notation itself. In the end, all workflows within Dorico, even those requiring high-fidelity audible feedback, come back to notation. Music writers that aren’t interested in notation will have never given Dorico a second glance.
So, as a writer who finds notation far more efficient and creative than the piano roll, and would also love to cut out DAWs for high-fidelity aural feedback, I’m asking you to please build the most exceptional flexibility and realism your business can afford to. Why stop at being the best notation software? A great next step for me would be high-quality humanization parameters (something at least as good as Divisimate or an integration with Divisimate). I could stay in Dorico and write more efficiently, accurately and beautifully! 