Voices

Voices provide a way to subdivide an instrument into its own separate parts, which play simultaneously. This can be useful for polyphonic instruments, that is, instruments that can play more than one note at a time, e.g. guitar, piano.

Example

piano:
  V1: c d e f g1
  V2: e f g a b1
  V3: g a b > c d1

  V0: c e g > c2.

Each voice is its own sequence of note events. The first note/rest in each voice starts at the same time, like the notes in a chord. Whereas a chord bumps forward the current offset by the shortest note duration in the chord, after a group of voices, the current offset is that of the longest voice in the group. V0: signals the end of a voice grouping and a return to using a single voice -- the first note placed after V0: will happen after all voices in the group have finished.