A recent talk on DSL(Domain Specific Language) got me thinking about music notations and DSL( well am basically a carnatic musician but recently started learning western violin and sheet music has totally grabbed my interest right now) . I started surfing to see what has been done in this area and I got quite a lot of interesting information that i thought i could consolidate and blog about.
Sheet music is quite complex with so much meaning to each symbol to describe a song's scale, timing and notes with tracks for each instrument. So keying in notes and getting a sheet of notations has its own language to describe its various components. The most interesting thing i found was that there are several approaches and tools for this and several more coming up but there is no single standard that is used by everyone as well as no standard followed for the language specification. A widely prescribed one is based on XML, SMDL(Standard Music Description Language) and all the advantages of XML wrt interoperability is taken by it. MusicXML is a software using this which has a DTD for the notations. Apart from this there are several other language specifications using XML itself that extend SMDL. WEDEL is one such which uses XML but models using MOODS( Music Object Oriented Distributed System) for editing sheet music in a distributed environment like in orchestras. Other softwares are there for optical character recognition and interpreting from sheet music. A lot of freewares are available now for specifying notations and getting quality sheet printouts like LilyPond, iABC, Brahms each having its own specification .
A lot of work is still going on for supporting mordern music notations and standardizing the specification. A common music notation DSL could help a lot, probably taking the best of all the available specifications cause a common language makes communication easier always :)
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- Harini
- I apply logic to everything, immensely interested in coding, analysis and music.
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4 comments:
so whats your plan of action in this direction? as you have mentioned, there are lots of things out there and its almost like a mess :-(
Yeah it is a total mess. The thing is there are a lot of proprietary softwares being used widely in the industry like Sibelius, Finale, Score which use their own formats again. One good thing is that MusicXML format is starting to become a standard as Sibelius and Finale now support it. The open source softwares still use their own formats. It is more about every software starting to either support MusicXML or find a better format that everyone agrees upon.My plan of action right now is to research more about what are the other formats, their advantages and disadvantages and what would be an ideal standard format for all. To talk about advantages and disadvantages I also need to read more about sheet music itself to find its best representation :) Any help and suggestions are welcome :)
It is a good idea to create / support an open standard for music just like MathML and other markup language standards for their own respective fields. You can certainly take the initiative and come up with "what would be an ideal standard format for all". :) I am sure lot of good hearted souls will come and support you along the way to reach the open standard.
On a related note, it might be a good idea to consider non XML based formats to keep the format simple and human readable --> to really keep the format more of a DSL than Xml.
+ 1 for a non XML based format.
But the bigger question is, what use cases do we see for this notation?
This question would determine which format would make more sense.
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