musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Melissma Slur Interaction for Legato
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- Dominant language
- C++
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Description
Your idea
For many instruments playback of slurred notes should be different from regular notes. However in modern pop vocal music, we often get rid of (at least the long) slurs to increase readability and just keep the melissmas to remove redunant clutter (as a mellisma already states the note transitions to be legato). But this could still be taken into account in the playback as if there was a slur -> it's both a sign to be played legato.
Moreover there are more ways one could think of a bi-directional interaction between slurs and melissmas.
E.g. auto-slur melissmas (but give the user the opportunity to hide the auto-slurs [especially the long ones] for better readability) or make auto-melissmas on a slurred notes with text.
Problem to be solved
Slurs and Melissmas both mean a passage to be played legato. But sometimes - especially long slurs - just make the score more cluttered without adding new information. On the other hand we do not want to sacrifice legato playback in that case (if there is any).

Prior art
I just hide the slurs (or delete them) and go with the melissmas.
I have seen some plugins do that in antoher notation program (but I've forgot which one, maybe Dorico)?
Additional context
No response
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by locating the playback handling for slurs and melismas, then clarify whether melismas should trigger legato and how hidden or automatically generated notation should behave. Done requires an agreed interaction and corresponding playback and readability behavior.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp
- Domain
- desktop
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100