SATB shaped notes.

[Hermie17]

Hey I am new here, I installed Audiveris after I tried to set up a custom GPT to convert PDF to XML files. It directed me here. Any way, as the title may have let you know, I work with SATB choral (barbershop quartet) arrangements and we use the Aiken Shaped note system. Any chance someone has a shaped note tool kit for Audiverse, or a chance of that being added to the program?
I have a number of songs I have hand typeset from old books to XML files thru musescore but that is a tedious and timeconsuming process. I can give them to someone to help train an AI tho if needed.

Thanks for your input.

edit*
another fix for this would be to give the software an override to replace all shaped notes with round notes. Converting round notes to shaped in Musescore or Finale is not difficult at all if the notes stay on their proper lines...

[hbitteur]

@Hermie17
Making Audiveris support shape notes is technically feasible.
We did something similar for drum notation over the 2022-2023 period, resulting in the 5.3 release.

You should expect several months to implement your seven shape notation. Versus how many people interested by this specific feature?
That's the question.

[Hermie17]

I am worried that not many people need that functionality.... I would be happy to try to work on it myself but I'm not a programmer...

[nathandial]

I'd like this functionality and I am a programmer. Not sure I have the free time or that it's worth it, but it might be. What would a guide for adding new glyphs for shape notes look like? Are there examples that are easy to follow, or would it be a research project?

[hbitteur]

@nathandial
A first part would consist in extending the current head templates to include these new shapes.
Not a big deal, you can have a look at the code of the "HEADS" step.

For the rest, I'm not familiar at all with this notation. It seems to depend on the Clef, according to Wikipedia.

More importantly, does MusicXML support this notation? A quick search gave me a negative answer. So, this is a "no go" for me.

[aikebah]

@hbitteur not interested in this feature myself, but your search appears to have been missing some parts of the official MusicXML documentation as MusicXML does support aiken 7-shape system noteheads in the notehead-value simpletype