Re: Music Notation on the Web

Hi Dan and Roger,

If you want to read up on the main issues surrounding music notation
formats, there are two fundamental references that you may find helpful.

The classic book in the field is "Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical
Codes", edited by Eleanor Selfridge-Field and published by MIT Press in
1997. This was our starting point when we started designing the MusicXML
format in 2000. The MuseData and Humdrum formats described in the book are
the main sources for MusicXML's design. Although the book obviously does not
include more recent formats like MusicXML, it is still a great resource for
understanding past work in the field and the complexities of music notation
representation. It's available at Amazon and elsewhere.

The other fundamental reference is Don Byrd's 1984 thesis on "Music Notation
by Computer". The analysis of the complexity of music notation and the
tradeoffs between automation and control are still relevant today and to
this very discussion. Don argues that "'fully automatic high-quality music
notation' is not merely nontrivial but in general impossible without
human-level intelligence." This is still true today despite the great
advances in automatic formatting in recent years. The thesis can be
downloaded from:

  http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Papers/DonDissScanned.pdf

For more recent publications, a lot published about MusicXML both by myself
and by people using MusicXML for different purposes. Our site includes a lot
of links, as well as full-text versions of nearly all of my papers. You can
find more information at:

  http://www.recordare.com/musicxml/publications

This includes a link to my "Lessons from the Adoption of MusicXML as an
Interchange Standard" XML 2006 paper which explains why standardization of
music notation in groups like ISO have failed in the past, and by extension
why a W3C effort would also fail at this time. That particular section of
the paper can be found at:

  http://www.recordare.com/musicxml/xml-2006/avoid-overhead

This situation may well change in the future as both MusicXML and web audio
technologies mature. At that point the audio working group charter could
change as well.

Best regards,

Michael Good
Recordare LLC
www.recordare.com