MusicXml: Symbolic Music Interchange Format Carmine Casciato MUMT 611 Thursday, January 27th, 2005

Overview Needs addressed by MusicXML Structure of a MusicXML document Limitations of MusicXML

Prior Work Music notation MuseData - generic, platform independent, multi-purpose Humdrum - unlimited amount of representation syntax can be defined -both time and part information can be used Eleanor Selfridge-Field’s Beyond MIDI: A Handbook of Musical Codes

Prior Work (cont.) Notational Interchange File Format - focuses on graphic score output, unwieldy for performance apps Standard Music Description Language - a Standard Generalized Markup Language application, a meta-DTD of the Hypermedia/Time-Based Structured Language -specialized nomenclature eg. cantus, gamut, nominal pitch, fictum adjustment, music ficta gamut -generalized to encode works beyond Western notation, any notation -never implemented commercially MIDI - does not encode notational data such as stem direction, rest information, or enharmonic notes

MuseData Database MuseData/ COMPOSER1/ COMPOSER2/ . . . COMPOSERn/ INDEX SOURCE1/ SOURCE2/ SOURCEn/ WORK1/ WORK2/ WORKn/ STAGE1/ MVT1/ MVT2/ MVTn/ STAGE2/

MuseData Note Information measure 1 E4 2 D4 2 C4 2 rest 2 measure 2 measure 3 G4 2 F4 1 E4 4 measure 4

Commercial Emphasis “Since its introduction in 2000, MusicXML has become the most quickly adopted symbolic music interchange format…with support by market and technology leaders in both music notation and music scanning.” “MusicXML has been developed from a commercial perspective as opposed to a research perspective.” To do for online sheet music and music notation software what MIDI did for electronic synthesizers (Good 2002)

Applications Supporting MusicXML

Advantages of XML Text based Platform independent Hierarchical Structures Self-defining Humdrum requires UNIX savvy, MuseData tools run in custom IDE

MusicXML “MusicXML is basically an XML updating of MuseData, with the addition of some key concepts from Humdrum. Since both formats have been used primarily for work in classical and folk music, MusicXML was extended beyond those boundaries to better support contemporary popular music.” Supports Common Western Notation from the 17th century onwards Popular music notation (guitar chord fingerings) Documents are decoded by Document Type Definitions MIDI information can also be encoded Adopts Humdrum approach: part-based vs. time-based Does not contain presentation information MusicXML DTD is under royalty free licence to encourage development

Hello World! <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE score-partwise PUBLIC "-//Recordare//DTD MusicXML 1.0 Partwise//EN" "http://www.musicxml.org/dtds/partwise.dtd"> <score-partwise> <part-list> <score-part id="P1"> <part-name>Music</part-name> </score-part> </part-list>

Hello World! <part id="P1"> <measure number="1"> <attributes> <divisions>1</divisions> <key> <fifths>0</fifths> </key> <time> <beats>4</beats> <beat-type>4</beat-type> </time> <clef> <sign>G</sign> <line>2</line> </clef> </attributes>

Hello World! <note> <pitch> <step>C</step> <octave>4</octave> </pitch> <duration>4</duration> <type>whole</type> </note> </measure> </part> </score-partwise>

Limitations Restricts itself to Common Western Notation Verbose (Seven times larger than MuseData file with same information) Use of DTDs versus Schemas -Extensibility vs Stronger typing Useful in an academic setting? -Does not have existing toolset (Humdrum) -Does not encode presentation information -however… We've tried them all and find SharpEye, with post-processing in Finale (and several other things downstream of that) the most useful…I suspect that each program will suit best the repertories on which it is trained. We work on classical music, and that seems to be SharpEye's forte. Email by Seldridge-Field to the Music-IR list on OCR (January 25th)

Future work Future work: Nonstandard key signatures; Placement and orientation; Position;Sound attributes - reverb, pan, pedals; Copyright protection; Browser Plugin

Resources Good, Michael, 2002. MusicXML in Practice: Issues in Translation and Analysis. Proceedings of the First International Conference MAX 2002: Musical Applications Using XML : 47-54. Milan, September 19-20, 2002. Cunningham, Stuart, 2003. Suitability of MusicXML as a Format for Computer Music Notation and Interchange. Available from Center for Applied Internet Research http://www.newi.ac.uk/cunninghams/research/SuitabilityMusicXML.pdf