Music Representation of Score, Sound, MIDI, Structure and Metadata All Integrated in a Single Multilayer Environment Based on XML - Intelligent Music Information Systems: Tools and Methodologies - page 321

Figure 9. The MX audio mapper

of heterogeneous contents within a single music
description.
Since a key concept of the MX format is the
mutual synchronization of all associated media,
the process of adding a certain kind of material
cannot be viewed merely as linking a file, but it
needs an automatic, semiautomatic, or manual
synchronization procedure. Unfortunately, the
process required to map and synchronize heteroge-
neous media at the moment cannot be performed
automatically with a high precision degree. As
regards notational contents, this would require a
reliable OMR 8 system in order to recognize musi-
cal symbols in scores, even when autographical.
Besides, such symbols should be automatically
put in relationship with the spine structure. As
regards audio information, an effective applica-
tion to extract automatically music events from a
complex audio track should be employed, but some
well-known limits in automated music analysis
techniques prevent the extensive applicability of
this approach.
On the other hand, mapping music events by
a completely hand-made process would imply a
terrible waste of time and energy: it would require,
for instance, an accurate listening of the audio

tracks in a sound editing environment, or the
precise computation of the “bounding box” around
each music event in a digital imaging software.
Calculating milliseconds and pixels by hand is
neither effective nor efficient. A better solution
is designing and implementing some aiding ap-
plications to speed up the mapping process.
MX Graphic Mapper is the application de-
voted to link the logic events of an MX file to
their corresponding graphic counterparts within
one or more score images (see Figure 8); in this
way, the final MX file will contain a new block of
information defining where a particular event—a
note, a rest, a clef, and so forth—is graphically
located in the score representation. Through this
tool, an existing MX file that needs to be mapped
is opened and scanned, and a list of all note/rest
events is created. The user can open one or more
images that contain the score in order to map all
the events. The mapping procedure is done by
dragging rectangles on the score image loaded
in the central window, while the representation
of the note/rest event to be mapped is graphically
shown in the “Event Graphic Parser” and the XML
fragment to be added is visible in the upper part
of the interface. When a rectangle is created, the