Music Navigation with Symbols and Layers E-Book

Denis L. Baggi

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 278

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Music is much more than listening to audio encoded in some unreadable binary format. It is, instead, an adventure similar to reading a book and entering its world, complete with a story, plot, sound, images, texts, and plenty of related data with, for instance, historical, scientific, literary, and musicological contents. Navigation of this world, such as that of an opera, a jazz suite and jam session, a symphony, a piece from non-Western culture, is possible thanks to the specifications of new standard IEEE 1599, IEEE Recommended Practice for Defining a Commonly Acceptable Musical Application Using XML, which uses symbols in language XML and music layers to express all its multimedia characteristics. Because of its encompassing features, this standard allows the use of existing audio and video standards, as well as recuperation of material in some old format, the events of which are managed by a single XML file, which is human and machine readable - musical symbols have been read by humans for at least forty centuries. Anyone wanting to realize a computer application using IEEE 1599 -- music and computer science departments, computer generated music research laboratories (e.g. CCRMA at Stanford, CNMAT at Berkeley, and IRCAM in Paris), music library conservationists, music industry frontrunners (Apple, TDK, Yamaha, Sony), etc. -- will need this first book-length explanation of the new standard as a reference. The book will include a manual teaching how to encode music with IEEE 1599 as an appendix, plus a CD-R with a video demonstrating the applications described in the text and actual sample applications that the user can load onto his or her PC and experiment with.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

IEEE

Title page

Copyright page

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Illustration of IEEE 1599

Preface

A Brief Introduction to the IEEE 1599 Standard

Contributors

1: The IEEE 1599 Standard

1.1 Introduction

Important Features of IEEE 1599

Examples of Applications of IEEE 1599 to Increase Music Enjoyment

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

2: Encoding Music Information

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Heterogeneous Descriptions of Music

2.3 Available File Formats

2.4 Key Features of IEEE 1599

2.5 Multi-Layer Structure

2.6 The Logic Layer

2.7 The Spine

3: Structuring Music Information

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Music Objects and Music Algorithms

3.3 Petri Nets

3.4 Music Petri Nets

3.5 Music Analysis Using Music Petri Nets

3.6 Real-Time Interaction with Music Petri Nets

3.7 Conclusions

4: Modeling and Searching Music Collections

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Describing Music Content

4.3 Music Description in IEEE 1599

4.4 The Theoretical Framework

4.5 Music Modeling and Retrieval in IEEE 1599

4.6 Case Study: Graph-Categorial Modeling

5: Feature Extraction and Synchronization among Layers

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Encoding Synchronization Information

5.3 Overview of Synchronization Algorithms

5.4 VarSi: An Automatic Score-to-Audio Synchronization Algorithm Based on the IEEE 1599 Format

6: IEEE 1599 and Sound Synthesis

6.1 Introduction

6.2 From Music Symbols to Sound Synthesis

6.3 From Sound Synthesis to Music Symbols

6.4 An Example of Encoding

6.5 Conclusions

7: IEEE 1599 Applications for Entertainment and Education

7.1 Introduction

7.2 IEEE 1599 for Entertainment

7.3 IEEE 1599 for Music Education

7.4 IEEE 1599-Based Music Viewers

7.5 Case Studies

8: Past Projects Using Symbols for Music

8.1 Brief History

8.2 Bass Computerized Harmonization (BA-C-H)

8.3 Harmony Machine

8.4 NeurSwing, an Automatic Jazz Rhythm Section Built with Neural Nets

8.5 The Paul Glass System

8.6 A Program That Finds Notes and Type of a Chord and Plays It

8.7 Summary of Projects

8.8 Conclusions

Appendix A. Brief History of IEEE 1599 Standard, and Acknowledgments

Appendix B. IEEE Document-Type Definitions (DTDs)

Appendix C. IEEE 1599 Demonstration Videos

Index

Cover Design: Michael Rutkowski

Cover Illustration: © Ming Lok Fung/iStockphoto

Copyright © 2013 by the IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Music navigation with symbols and layers : toward content browsing with IEEE 1599 XML encoding / edited by Denis L. Baggi and Goffredo M. Haus.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-59716-3 (cloth)

1. Information storage and retrieval systems–Music. 2. XML (Document markup language) I. Baggi, Denis. II. Haus, Goffredo.

ML74.3.M87 2012

780.285'674–dc23

2012027836

Illustration of IEEE 1599, artwork by Marco Mariotta, Marco Mariotta Designs, Ascona, Switzerland.

Preface

Computer Generated Music is the term used by the IEEE Computer Society to indicate the vast scientific and engineering area that deals with computer applications to music and musicology. At one extreme, one finds artistic music created, composed, and/or performed with the help of computers—as are the majority of contemporary music pieces. At the other extreme is electronic signal processing, in which the Technical Committee dedicated to this discipline, in existence since 1992, is happy to include all kinds of projects, including extremes.

Fortunately for both the layman and the practitioner, thousands of publications are in existence on the subject, as interest in this field has grown ever since the inception of the computer.1 Here, we provide a brief review of a few well-known textbooks as a starting point for interested readers, and to allow a positioning of this new work within the existing literature.

Experimental Music [Hiller and Isaacson 1959; see also Chapter 7] has the merit of being the first-known experiment from which a piece of music was obtained from a computer program. One of the authors, Hiller, also contributed an important chapter in [Lincoln 1970], providing an up-to-date report for the time of the publication. Since then, collections of reports on interesting projects have steadily published, such as Roads [1989] and Roads and Srawn [1985], the extension of the special issue of IEEE COMPUTER dedicated to Computer Generated Music [Baggi 1992] with companion audio CD, and, earlier, one of the first collections with a floppy record included in the finished result von Foerster and Beauchamp [1969], as well as Brook [1970] with its mention of symbolic code. As curiosities, we shall mention an early work by Barbaud [1965], with programming code in ALGOL, while Forte [1973] is a model for atonal music that could easily be implemented as a programmed system similar to Macsyma, Mathematica, and other systems for symbolic mathematics.

This book is therefore not a mere addition to the existing collections on the subject, but instead emphasizes the symbolic representation of music—as practiced in virtually all musical cultures worldwide—and retains all other aspects of music, especially sound. IEEE 1599 standard is a new technology in which the core of music representation is a symbolic file in Extensible Markup Language (XML) that refers to all musical layers representing sound, audio, images (scores), video, metadata (historical details, catalogs, visual art), and the like. It is therefore an encompassing guide that represents, addresses, and incorporates all aspects of music, even those not anticipated at the time of standard approval. It includes all past, present, and future formats and standards for sound, performance, representation, and so on.

The following is a brief overview of the book.

Chapter1 gives a simple, brief technical overview to understanding all applications, in particular I to VII, which exist and are complete, as well as VIII and IX, which have been considered, but are not fully realized.

Chapter2 is a technical chapter that describes in detail how synchronization among different layers is achieved, mostly thanks to the role of the spine, the data structure that holds all different layers together.

Chapter3 describes how, in addition to dealing with all entities of Common Western Notation such as notes, rests, music symbols, and so on, IEEE 1599 also covers complete structures, music excerpts, segments, and the like, thus becoming a useful tool for musical analysis.

Chapter4 describes in deep detail how collections and music can be described, modeled, sought after, and indexed for musicological applications. Understanding some of the modeling may require elements of mathematical and analytical tools that are not supplied in this text.

Chapter5 describes in detail how musical events—for example, notes, note symbols, and audio and video renditions—can be referenced in a unique way, thus allowing synchronization among different piece versions, representations, and multimedia renditions that, as the examples of Chapter 1 demonstrate, are unique to IEEE 1599.

Chapter6 explains the versatility of audio rendering inherent in IEEE 1599 and how other synthesis languages (e.g., Csound) can be made isomorphic to an IEEE 1599 symbolic representation.

Chapter7 describes future applications for entertainment and education made possible by the availability of such a complete and encompassing technology such as IEEE 1599.

Chapter8 does not particularly refer to IEEE 1599, but describes past projects that have used the technique of Symbol Manipulation for music, a technique that has culminated in the development of IEEE 1599. Had that technology been available at that time, it could have been used for all these projects. It relates to Chapter 7, which describes future projects that can and will be carried out using IEEE 1599 Technology.

AppendicesA,B, andC conclude the book.

To summarize, the purpose of this book is to demonstrate that it is possible to attain systems and applications that take into account all aspects of a music piece, making it navigable and interactive as a whole, without sacrificing past interpretations, formats, representations, and performances.

Denis L. Baggi

Goffredo M. Haus

Note

1 And for several centuries, if not millennia, if one considers Babylonian algorithms; see the Introduction.

References

Baggi, D., ed., and author. 1992. Readings in Computer Generated Music. IEEE CS Press.

Barbaud, P. 1965. Initiation à la composition musicale automatique. Paris: Dunod.

Brook, B.S., ed. 1970. Musicology and the Computer. City University of New York Press.

Forte, A. 1973. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hiller, L.A., and Isaacson, L.M. 1959. Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lincoln, H.B., ed. 1970. The Computer and Music. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Roads, C., ed. 1989. The Music Machine, Selected Readings from the Computer Music Journal. MIT Press.

Roads, C., and Srawn, J., eds. 1985. Foundations of Computer Music. MIT Press.

von Foerster, H., and Beauchamp, J.W. 1969. Music by Computers. John Wiley and Sons.

A Brief Introduction to the IEEE 1599 Standard

Denis L. Baggi and Goffredo M. Haus

Proposed and de facto standards that focus on some aspects of music have been around for several decades—ever since the need arose to apply computer techniques to music and musi­cology. Some deal with audio aspects; some with the graphical representation or score of music; some with performance; some with specialized standards with choreography; and so on.

At the same time, the idea of representing music with symbols is not new. If we consider music notation, it has been used for several centuries in the West, and for computer applications, several decades, as shown by the the Plaine and Easie Code [Brook 1970] and Digital Alternate Realization of Musical Symbols (DARMS) [Erickson 1975].

More recently, attempts have been made to use the new technology brought about by SGML, a subset of which has been defined for music, namely, SMDL or Standard Music Description Language [Newcomb 1991]. Though well-defined, it failed to attract much attention, perhaps because of lack of applications.

Presently, there are some de facto standards using Extensible Markup Language (XML), two of which can be seen as the ancestors of this work. MusicXML is a proprietary standard by company Recordare [Recordare] and is used in dozens of existing applications on the market (including the popular program Finale). This standard has been in existence for several years, and new versions are constantly being released. The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) [Roland] is a project by the Digital Library of the University of Virginia and it has been used in a few instances of music encoding.

In fact, music has been annotated for at least the past forty centuries in practically all cultures with symbols that represent musical events—such as notes, rests, clefs, performance indications—and therefore attempts have been made to capitalize on this experience and create music standards based on symbols. Some of these standards include SMDL, MEI, and MusicXML, as mentioned, as well as Hy Time, SMIL, MusiXML, MusiCat and MDL, WEDELMUSIC, MNML, MML, MuTaTeD, MusicML, and ChordML (for a detailed description, see Haus and Longari [2002]).

It would therefore seem that no need exists for a new standard such as IEEE 1599, were it not for the fact that this new recommended practice has some features not found anywhere else. These features include:

Musical events and other indications are represented with symbols—just by itself, this is not new.The symbols are expressed in language XML, thus inheriting the features of XML such as: natural extensibility, flexibility, and durability, which may allow the standard to evolve beyond Common Western Music Notation and toward notational formats not yet established—such as those used by the music avant-garde [Cage 1968].The concept of layers, that allow integrated representation of several aspects of music, such as its graphic notation, texts (as in songs and opera), audio (from a recording), performance indications, and everything that is related to the piece, such as title, composer, interpreter, dates, posters, and discographical and bibliographical data.Applications that synchronize all layers and events, as with a running indicator on the score or the libretto during an audition, that allow music fruition independently of the version or the rendition, and independently of the audio or video format, thanks to a special data structure called spine.As a consequence, all previous encoding of a piece of music can be recuperated as desired, since they remain in their original format (e.g., WAV, MP3, MIDI, acoustical recording), and are put under a single comprehensive meta-language in which every media file is related to all others with links, thus creating an all-encompassing music information system that can be navigated in all its aspects.

The idea of music navigation is akin to entering the virtual world of a great poem or novel, such as Homer’s Iliad or Dante’s Divine Comedy. This extends the enjoyment of music beyond that of simple listening, by providing information on who is doing what—as in a jazz piece or an opera—on how the piece is built—both at structural and at the detailed level—and on the constituents of a piece, up to a musicological analysis—which can be supplied by semantics webs and ontologies.

References

Brook, B.S. 1970. “The Plaine and Easie Code.” In Musicology and the Computer, ed. Barry S. Brook. New York: City University of New York Press, pp. 53–56.

Cage, J. 1968. Notations. New York: Something Else Press.

Erickson, R.F. 1975. “The Darms Project: A Status Report.” Computers and the Humanities 9(6):291–298.

Haus, Goffredo, and Longari, M. 2002. “Towards a Symbolic/Yime-Based Music Language based on XML.” Proceedings of the First International Conference MAX2002, IEEE, pp. 38–45.

Haus, Goffredo, and Longari, M. 2005. “A Multi-Layered Time-Based Music Description Approach based on XML.” Computer Music Journal, 29(1):70–85.

Newcomb, S.R. 1991. “Standard Music Description Language complies with hypermedia standard.” IEEE Computer, pp. 76–79 (July).

Recordare. http://www.recordare.com/xml.html.

Roland, P. “The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) DTD and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition.” http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/mei/mei_ocve.pdf.

Contributors

Denis L. Baggi

Think-Lab

Lugano, Switzerland

Adriano Baratè

LIM, Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale

Università degli Studi di Milano

Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione

Milano, Italy

Antonello D’Aguanno

Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale (LIM)

Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione (DICo)

Università degli Studi di Milano

Milano, Italy

Goffredo M. Haus

Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione

Università degli Studi di Milano

Milano, Italy

Luca A. Ludovico

LIM, Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale

Università degli Studi di Milano

Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione

Milano, Italy

Davide A. Mauro

LIM, Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale

Università degli Studi di Milano

Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione

Milano, Italy

Alberto Pinto

Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale (LIM)

Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione (DICo)

Università degli Studi di Milano

Milano, Italy

1

The IEEE 1599 Standard

Denis L. Baggi and Goffredo M. Haus

Summary: This chapter gives a brief and simplified technical overview useful in the understanding of all IEEE 1599 applications, in particular from I to VII, which exist and are complete, and VIII and IX, which have been studied but not yet fully realized.

1.1 Introduction

IEEE 1599 is both a standard and a technology to represent and encode music, in all its aspects, making music enjoyment a total experience akin to that lived with literary masterpieces and great movies, well beyond the rendering of a binary file through a micro earphone.