Music Navigation with Symbols and Layers

Music is much more than listening to audio encoded in someunreadable binary format. It is, instead, an adventure similar toreading a book and entering its world, complete with a story, plot,sound, images, texts, and plenty of related data with, forinstance, historical, scientific, literary, and musicologicalcontents. Navigation of this world, such as that of an opera, ajazz suite and jam session, a symphony, a piece from non-Westernculture, is possible thanks to the specifications of new standardIEEE 1599, IEEE Recommended Practice for Defining a CommonlyAcceptable Musical Application Using XML, which uses symbols inlanguage XML and music layers to express all its multimediacharacteristics. Because of its encompassing features, thisstandard allows the use of existing audio and video standards, aswell as recuperation of material in some old format, the events ofwhich are managed by a single XML file, which is human and machinereadable - musical symbols have been read by humans for at leastforty centuries. Anyone wanting to realize a computer application using IEEE 1599-- music and computer science departments, computer generated musicresearch laboratories (e.g. CCRMA at Stanford, CNMAT at Berkeley,and IRCAM in Paris), music library conservationists, music industryfrontrunners (Apple, TDK, Yamaha, Sony), etc. -- will need thisfirst book-length explanation of the new standard as areference. The book will include a manual teaching how to encode music withIEEE 1599 as an appendix, plus a CD-R with a video demonstratingthe applications described in the text and actual sampleapplications that the user can load onto his or her PC andexperiment with.