 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Things They're Doing to Music Major Keary |
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In a recent review (PC Update, February 2001) of Michael
Kay's XSLT Programmers Reference I mentioned the use of XSLT to convert between
ChordML, which is designed for encoding the harmonic accompaniment to vocal lyrics; Music
Markup Language (MML), which is designed for serious musicological analysis; and
MusicML, which is an XML application that displays music notation graphically. Further, XSLT
can be used to convert from any of those formats into visual music notation; to play the music on a
synthesiser by generating a MIDI file; to transpose the music into a different key; or to extract
the lyrics into HTML or some other XML document.
A copy of XSLT Programmers Reference is in the library. It has been written for programmers
and developers, but the music transformation example is written in plain language and well worth
looking at; who knows, member musicologists may be converted to XSLT.
Just as interesting is a description contained in Managing Gigabytes; the authors have set
up a web site http://www.nzdl.org to showcase their mg data
storage and retrieval system. On the site is the Melody Index, which does not use mg, but
"relies on an entirely different searching mechanism".
The index is able to retrieve "music on the basis of a few notes that are sung, hummed, or
otherwise entered . [and] users can literally sing a few bars and have all the melodies containing
that sequence of notes retrieved and displayed ." . It uses a variety of matching procedures that
involve "melodic contour, musical intervals, and rhythm".
The database contains some 1700 tunes of British and North American origin, some 5500 tunes of
German ballads and folk songs; some 2100 tunes of ethnic Chinese songs; and fifty tunes of Irish
folk songs.
The system is described by R. J. McNab, and several others, in "Toward the digital music library:
tune retrieval from acoustic input", published in Proceedings of Digital Libraries '96 (Fox
and Marchionini, editors, published by ACM Press). Amongst the "several others" is Ian Witten, one
of the authors of Managing Gigabytes 2/e (ISBN 1-55860-570-3, published by Morgan Kaufmann,
RRP $134.20); two of the authors are from New Zealand universities and the third is from Melbourne
University. This highly acclaimed text, which will be reviewed in a later issue, is about managing
large data collections and covers compression, document images, retrieval systems, and
indexing.
Reprinted from the May 2001 issue of PC Update,
the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
