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should be considered music descriptions. We will
face the matter of a comprehensive description
of music in the next section; at the moment, for
our purposes it is sufficient to realize that music
communication is very rich, thus also the number
of its possible descriptions will be high.
Any meaning we assign to the term “descrip-
tion”, the problem of describing music in a com-
puter-based system is not a technological one.
In general, we can choose the most appropriate
between already existing file formats aimed at
music description, according to the interpreta-
tion we consider. The evidence comes from the
large number of available file formats addressed
to music enjoyment. For example, AAC, MP3,
and PCM formats are commonly used to encode
audio recordings; MIDI represents a well known
standard for computer-driven performance; GIF,
JPEG and TIFF files can contain the results of a
scanning process of scores; DARMS, NIFF, and
MusicXML formats are aimed at score typing
and publishing, and so forth.
So, the problem of music description on
computer systems is not technological, rather
there exists a theoretical problem. The latter can
be summarized through the following key ques-
tions: Which facets of music information should
be described? Are heterogeneous communication
levels involved? Is an encoding format currently
available to catch the different aspects of music
information? In the next section we will try to
answer these questions.
score that musicians read as well as a number of
other related contents. Let us cite the example of
opera houses (Haus, 1998) or music publishers
(Haus, & Ludovico, 2005), where a great amount
of heterogeneous music documents are available:
scores, audio/video recordings, fliers, playbills,
posters, photos, stage maps, sketches, and so forth.
Our definition of comprehensive description of
music embraces all the aspects we have cited.
As we have affirmed before, specific encoding
formats to represent peculiar music features are
already commonly accepted and used. But such
formats are characterized by an intrinsic limita-
tion: they can describe music data or metadata
for score, audio tracks, computer performances
of music pieces, but they are not intended to en-
code all these aspects together. On the contrary,
we are interested in a “comprehensive” repre-
sentation and enjoyment of music, addressed to
musicologists as well as to performers, to music
students as well as to untrained people simply
interested in music. The key characteristics that
a comprehensive format should support can be
summarized as follows:
•
Richness in the multimedia descriptions
related to the same music piece (graphical,
audio, and video contents).
•
Possibility to link and perform a number of
media objects of the same type (for instance,
many performances of the same piece or
many score scans coming from different
editions).
a comprehensIve descrIptIon
of musIc
In addition, we want this comprehensive for-
mat to support complete synchronization among
time-based contents, meaning that audio and
video contents are kept synchronized with score
advancing, even when the user switches from
a particular performance to another, or from a
particular score edition to another.
Interaction should be supported as well.
Of course, this aspect cannot be realized by a
format, rather by applications working on the
In our opinion, it is necessary to conceive music
description in a comprehensive way. Before in-
vestigating this concept, let us recall that music
communication is made up of many different and
complementary aspects: music can be (and actu-
ally is) the idea that the composer translates to
symbols as well as their performance, the printed
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