First International Conference on Musical Application Using XML (review)

MAX2002, the First International Conference on Musical Application using XML, took place in Milan, Italy, at the seat of the Laboratory for Musical Informatics (LIM) on September 19 and 20, 2002. Although open to the public, it was not a typical conference in the sense that it was dedicated to a very specific topic and it sought to attract contributions that should materialize in actual work for the definition of a new standard for using XML.

Figure 1.

Goffredo Haus, conference chair.

After the introduction by host Goffredo Haus (see Figure 1), director of LIM and Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Information Sciences (DSI) at the State University of Milan, Denis Baggi explained the two main aspects of this project. First, there is the procedure of the Standards Activity Board (SAB) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the largest professional society of people active in the field (www.ieee.org). A subset dedicated to Computer Science is the Computer Society (CS), comprising about 100,000 members (www.computer.org). In September 2001, the SAB accepted a Project Authorization Request (PAR1599) for the establishment of a standard for the encoding, delivery, and reproduction of music, symbolic and sub-symbolic, via Web, DVD, and CD-ROM, to obviate the inherent deficiencies of existing de facto standards. These are either incomplete (MIDI), undeveloped Standard Music Description Language (SMDL), or binary and/or proprietary (AIFF, WAV, MP3). The use of XML should make the encoding of music readable and extensible. The IEEE CS Technical Committee on Computer Generated Music, chaired by Mr. Baggi, initiated this project (computer.org/tab/cgm/tc_cgm.htm).

Second, there exists the endorsement of an "abstract," which represents the first step for a request for research funding, by the global fund Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS), to which Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and the USA contribute (www.ims.org). The purpose of MAX2002 was also to determine who wants to contribute to the Standards Project and wishes to ask for financing through its own region.

The conference itself took place on the afternoon of 19 September and the next morning, while the afternoon of the 20th was dedicated to a brainstorming discussion to define more closely the objectives of the whole project. Here follows a brief summary of the contributions.

The first paper was by Giorgio Zoia, Ruo-Hua Zhou, and Marco Mattavelli of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, "MPEG Audio Coding and XML: Samples, Models, Descriptors." It described some of the already existing work in the direction of the proposed standard, within the MPEG4 and MPEG7 frameworks, and how this can be described using XML, in particular using the mark-up language BIFS (Binary Format for Scene Description). Examples given in the text of the Proceedings are apparently slightly outdated compared to the version available online.

"Automatic Marking of Musical Dictations By Applying the Edit Distance Algorithm On a Symbolic Music Representation" was the contribution of France Champagne and Guy Tremblais of the Université du Québec à Montreal, Canada. It was about the XML encoding of a melody and of what a music student notates of it during a musical dictation. The original score is then compared against that written by the student, while an algorithm identifies the differences and computes a grade. The results of the program are fine-tuned by examining those of the dictation instructor.

Jacques Steyn, an independent researcher and consultant from Hatfield, South Africa, contributed "Framework for a Music Markup Language." Some existing XML-based languages were mentioned: 4ML, FlowML, MusicML, MusiXML, MusicXML, which all focus on a subset of Common Western Notation (CWN), and ChordML. After listing some requirements for a proposed language, such as conformity with XML, simplicity, modularity, universality (beyond CWN), the author examined existing proposals: Hy Time, SMDL, and SMIL. He then distinguished among several features of music, intrinsic (core: e.g., notes; periphery: e.g...