Music Navigation with Symbols and Layers (PDF)

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.