The question posted above poses a simply logical question : If the notation is accurately defined in the marking, - ie. But I expect if you'd WANTED triplets, you'd have written them. It's a nebulous concept, but we can be pretty sure that, at a medium tempo, Swing ISN'T triplets.
![swing eighth notes sibelius 8 swing eighth notes sibelius 8](https://steinberg.help/dorico/v2/en/_shared_picts/picts/dorico/play_mode/play_mode_swing_playback_sounding_example.png)
So they've made it provide something closer to swing. In this case the programmers haven't been so mischievous! But they HAVE recognised that misguided composers often use a triplet when they want Swing. And that assignation can be completely arbitrary! It would be quite possible to assign that metric modulation text string to 'Instrument change to Violin' :-) It's looking up that string of characters in the Playback Dictionary and performing whatever function has been assigned to it.
![swing eighth notes sibelius 8 swing eighth notes sibelius 8](https://jazzpianoschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/correct-swing-feel.png)
However, Sibelius is not 'reading' the metric modulation directly. So does everyone, except some educators who seem frightened of the concept and prefer the precise but inaccurate 'metric modulation'. Sibelius playback recognises the word 'Swing'. Swing covers a range of 'Notes inégales' but almost always isn't triplets. One of the minor crusades of my musical life is persuading people NOT to use the 'metric modulation' notation when they mean 'Swing'. The swing isn't 66.6%, the length of the downbeat notes isn't precisely 100.0%, the notes don't have the same velocity.? That's because they specifically tried to program the Sibelius application so that its MIDI output would be close to a human player's interpretation of the notation. Here it is imported to Ableton Live, and the background is set to triplet grid. Perhaps the better alternative would be to educate the microscopic precision folks about the actual real-life use of the metric modulation marking? :)įWIW, the metric modulation swing marking in Sibelius 6.2 seems to produce a swing of about 60% when exported to a MIDI file. Which usually isn't the original intention. The downside of starting to use this would be, it would be contrasted with the old symbol, and it would enforce the incorrect interpretation of the old symbol as meaning "robotically precise triplets". To remedy the situation and cater for the microscopic interpretation - which might be becoming more and more common now that people experience life and communicate with each other through computerized filters instead of directly - it might be possible to use the "almost equal to" sign instead: The symbols are a way to communicate the idea of swing without using English, even though there's the possibility of misunderstanding it to mean "to be played as triplet swing with machine-like mechanical microscopic accuracy". And "swing 16ths" or "swing 8ths" would be even less widely understood. I cannot provide any statistics, but in my experience the symbolic metric modulation marking is more widely understood than the English word "swing". The meaning of the metric modulation marking is actually explained in the Sibelius manual: (from version 6.2. tenuto - I think it's just based on trying out different things and adjusting to taste. Another example is the note length percentages for normal vs.
![swing eighth notes sibelius 8 swing eighth notes sibelius 8](https://www.rpmseattle.com/of_note/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/sib7-tuplet-tooltip.png)
Why it's the default - maybe they listened to the 66.6/33.3 swing and decided that it didn't sound realistic? I think all of the things in the playback dictionary have been adjusted so that it would correspond to how people would actually play it. It's meant to be subjectively interpreted by a performer.Įxact triplet swing tends to sound awkward, and the faster the tempo is, the more you have to straighten out the swing. Musical notation is a means of written communication about musical ideas from humans to humans. If you study the timings of human players, you will notice that they almost never play mechanically exactly what the theoretical written values would be.