Music Navigation with Symbols and Layers: Toward Content Browsing with IEEE 1599 XML Encoding

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.

DENIS L. BAGGI was a faculty member at the University of Applied Sciences (SUPSI) near Lugano in Southern Switzerland and the director of the Laboratory for Semantic Systems and Multimedia. He was the chairman of the IEEE-SA Working Group in charge of Standard IEEE 1599 to encode and represent music, and is presently the CEO of Think-Lab.ch, a Swiss company dedicated to innovation.

GOFFREDO M. HAUS is the Director of the Department of Computer Science and Dean of the Department of Information and Communication Technology at the University of Milan. He has published nearly 100 scientific papers, dozens of other kinds of publications, and several books and CD-ROMs concerning computer applications in music.

Both Baggi and Haus cofounded the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Computer Generated Music.