Wedelmusic: First International Conference on Web Delivering of Music (review)

The Wedelmusic conference, which received its name from the WeDel Music (WEb DELivery of MUSIC) project, is the first of a series which is intended to deal with the distribution of music, including protection and fruition, transaction models, modeling, streaming, new media, conversion, and cultural heritage. The conference took place in Florence on the 23rd and 24th of November 2001, with about 60 participants from all over the world, including Australia, USA, Canada, Singapore, Germany, France, Austria, Denmark, England, Switzerland, and, of course, Italy.

The level of the contributions was generally very high, always at the scientific and technological edge of current research, and the organization was perfect, with well-working audio and video devices. The interaction among participants was likewise very effective and provided many opportunities for exchanges across the several areas represented.

Here follows a brief description of each contribution, with reference to the page numbers in the Proceedings (available from IEEE Computer Society Press, PO Box 3014, Los Alamitos, California 90720-1314, USA; electronic mail cs.books@computer.org).

23 November 2001

After the greeting by Conference Chair Paolo Nesi of the University of Florence, the first lecture was by Keynote Speaker Denis Baggi of the Institute for Applied Computer Science and Industrial Technology (CIMSI) of the Professional University of Southern Switzerland. This talk, "Understanding Jazz: The Structures of Swing" (p. 2), was not an academic lecture but a description, with examples, of the speaker's multimedia system (book CD-ROM) explaining the inner working of jazz improvisation. The originality of the approach lies in the fact that every musical example can be heard immediately, and that jazz history is treated in function of improvisational structures that traverse all periods. A few dozen examples were presented, with a demonstration by the speaker on his soprano saxophone.

Mr. Baggi also announced the existence of a new Standards project (IEEE Project Authorization Request 1599, dated 28 September 2001), concerning the "Definition of a Commonly Acceptable Musical Application Using the XML Language." The interest of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (www.ims.org) in financing this effort was also noted.

The first session was on Music Protection. Michael Arnold, of the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt, presented "Blind Detection of Multiple Audio Watermarks" (p. 4), a system of algorithms enabling blind detection of watermarks, including multiple ones. This was followed by Martin Schmucker, of the same institute, presenting "High Capacity Information Hiding in Music Scores" (p. 12), describing techniques to add watermarks to a score. He also presented "Using Musical Features for Watermarking Music Scores" (p. 20), on how to exploit musical features such as beams, slurs, and ties to embed watermarks. "Watermarking Music Scores While Printing" (p. 28) was introduced by Marius Bogdan Spinu of the University of Florence; this is a new technique for watermarking music while printing music sheets. Franco Bartolini, of the same university, presented "Watermarking-Based Copyright Protection of Internet-Delivered Multi-media" (p. 36), a proposal for an Electronic Copyright Management System to enable protection in open networks. Finally, "Content Protection and Usage Control For Digital Music" (p. 46), was delivered by Yongwei Zhu of the Kent Ridge Digital Lab in Singapore. This work concerns a watermarking scheme for both compressed music and MIDI format.

The next session, Music Editing and Recognition, started with "Automatic Formatting of Music Sheets" (p. 170), by Riccardo della Santa of the University of Florence, presenting a set of conditions and rules for music formatting formalized for execution by the Music Intelligence Formatting Language system. George Giannopoulos, of the University of Athens, discussed "Music Editors for Visually Impaired People: User Interface Specifications and System Design" (p. 178), user-interface specifications and software systems for the electronic editing of music by blind people. Lastly, Ivan Bruno, again of the University of Florence, presented "Optical Music Sheet Segmentation" (p. 183), a system that recognizes and extracts basic symbols from a musical score.

The last session of the day was on Applications. "The European Music Navigator: To Build Bridges Between Local, National and Global...