Re: Re: Music Notation on the Web - Last Call?

Hello,

I've been meaning to enter the discussion for a few days now but was stymied by the W3C site's inviting oneself to become an invited expert.

I've been spending quite literally ever day for over a year (and less intensively for several years beforehand) attempting to create an architecture involving open standards and technical solutions, amongst about 10,000 other things, the goal of which was to solve all the outstanding problems and limitations plaguing computer-aided music-making. I realize that sounds crazy, but I am very determined and happen to have enough luck early on, and devotion to enabling the type of music-making I imagined would be possible at the tail end of my lifetime unexpectedly arrive early and then just get stuck.  Having both achieved the milestones I'd barely dared hope to when I began, and rapidly coming to a point where I couldn't achieve further progress working alone but having only to finish creating resources with which to collaborate with others online and to perform the daunting work of cogently present it all in a way that others not privy to my own shorthand, conceptual assumptions, and the like I've been meaning to contact both Chris Rogers and Yves Raimond as, in all the 7+ years I've progressed from asking dumb questions to slowly realizing no one else was going to do any such thing, the only times I've thought perhaps I hadn't searched sufficiently far and wide for people who were thinking along the same lines as I was were when I stumbled upon your respective projects.

As you can see I've not even figured out the proper etiquette for cold-calling someone who seems likely to be interested in being chatted up by a complete stranger who makes assertions like the above hehe.

For the moment, though, I just chimed in to say that when it comes to temperaments there's nothing so thorough and amazing as scala (not the programming language) which was, "created by Manuel Op de Coul in the Netherlands. E-mail: coul@huygens-fokker.org."
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/downloads.html
This software is not Open Source, as by way of licensing his site states, "Scala is freeware without warranty and may not be sold, modified, or distributed for sale in combination with commercial products. It may only be distributed as one package containing all the files mentioned here and for free.."  Nevertheless, it would be worth the effort to at least politely ask him if he'd like to contribute his creation to the web standard.  The last time I downloaded the community-created temperament definition files there were over 5000.  That's the kind of widespread adoption one can't really compete with and senselesly cause yet more fragmentation while trying to prevent it, so perhaps his temperament-defining format itself could be adopted?

In any event it's 6am and that's all that I can muster by way of introduction at this hour.  I will, however, help in any way that I can as I've thought of little else recently as I am coincidentally writing documentation for more domains of knowledge which pertained to the computer-aided music ecosystem than I ever cared to imagine all day long.

Best regards,
C. Lindstrom


---- OriginalMessage ----
>From: "Yves Raimond" <Yves.Raimond@bbc.co.uk>
>To: "Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)" <RogerCutler@chevron.com>
>CC: public-xg-audio@w3.org
>Sent: Tue, Dec 14, 2010, 10:26 PM
>Subject: Re: Music Notation on the Web - Last Call?
>
>Hello,
>
>> I must confess that I'm about to give up on this -- basically because I seem to be out there completely alone.  I have a pretty strong feeling that something really needs to be done, but I don't seem to be striking a lot of chords with people.  An analogy that occurs to me:  The W3C people had a tendency to think that the XML representation of RDF solved all problems -- except in practice just about nobody actually used it, or perhaps only used it as a last resort.  Now they have finally figured out that recognizing and standardizing Turtle (which is much more compressed, readable and easy to write for simple tasks) is a REALLY good idea.  You MusicXML guys seem to be saying that MusicXML can do anything anybody wants -- but for some reason it really doesn't seem to have much uptake.  For example, you note that there are 94 MusicXML scores in CPDL.  Well, there are links to 84 ABC scores.  Neither number is very impressive and they are all external links -- CPDL does not "natively" offer either.
>> 
>> If there are people lurking out there who would like to see something happen here it would be nice to hear from you.
>> 
>
>I identify myself as a lurker, but I would like to see something happening in that space. MusicXML is good, but it lacks two things IMHO: the ability of linking between musical scores, and the ability to deal with non-Western music. Your mention of RDF strikes a chord (hem...) here - I definitely think that a RDF-based framework for musical score would enable some very interesting use cases. For example:
>
>* Linking musical scores to other music-related data (e.g. performance information, particular recordings, etc.) - it would be very nice to be able to link a particular phrase in a score to the part of a recording it corresponds to.
>* Interlinking musical scores - it would be great to be able to link similar phrases in different scores.
>
>I made a couple of related experiments a couple of years ago, trying to push musical scores in the Music Ontology (http://musicontology.com) framework. It is just a braindump though, nothing really serious yet. The main idea was to use an event-based model to describe score information, which would allow a fair degree of flexibility in the sort of musical events you want to represent.
>
>http://motools.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/motools/so/rdf/so.n3?revision=372&view=markup
>
>and an example of the first bars of Debussy's Syrinx:
>
>http://motools.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/motools/so/examples/syrinx.n3?revision=372&view=markup
>
>All this is based on the Event Ontology, which we use quite extensively at the BBC:
>
>http://motools.sourceforge.net/event/event.html
>
>Best,
>y
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: public-xg-audio-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-audio-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dan Brickley
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 11:44 AM
>> To: Michael Good
>> Cc: public-xg-audio@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Music Notation on the Web
>> 
>> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Michael Good <musicxml@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi Joe,
>> >
>> > You may well be right about this, but they are perceived issues even if not
>> > real issues. I think it's best to be able to go to site owners and say
>> > "we've fixed your problem" rather than saying "that's not really a problem."
>> > Sometimes just the aesthetics of space inefficiency are enough to make it a
>> > problem.
>> >
>> > The compressed file format offers many other advantages anyway. This
>> > includes keeping linked/included images together with scores in a single
>> > file, and offering a dedicated .mxl suffix rather than a generic .xml
>> > suffix. The tradeoff is that it's a binary file rather than a text file,
>> > albeit a very well-understood, standardized binary format (vanilla,
>> > Java-compatible zip files).
>> 
>> For what it's worth, this was the design also taken by the W3C Widgets
>> group, see Widget packaging spec, http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/
>> 
>> I think they had some headaches figuring out how exactly to cite Zip
>> from a formal W3C spec, but http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#zip-archive
>> is the current text.
>> 
>> More than a few ebooks formats do the same I'm sure,
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats ...
>> 
>> cheers,
>> 
>> Dan
>> 
>> 
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 15 December 2010 13:49:57 UTC