Stuart Pullinger's Homepage
Email: <s.pullinger AT SPAMFREE elec DOT gla DOT ac DOT uk>
The problem I will be addressing is the representation of music and musical structures inside a computer in musically useful ways. Current efforts at digital representation of music are directed towards a particular use of the music: score editors represent graphical notation; sequencers represent MIDI information; audio editors represent the recording of a performance etc. These focused efforts are limited in their scope - they do not allow for a complete representation any piece of music. Furthermore, the representations used are those that are expedient to the technologist not those which provide the most musical information. For example, the MIDI standard defines pitch with a value from 0-127. This is convenient for the programmer but is incapable of capturing the differences between two instruments playing the same piece with different tunings. Equally difficult is the representation of time: some approaches choose a logical representation of bars and beats however this is insufficient to locate those bars and beats in an audio file.
The proposed system will enable the extraction of musically useful information from a variety of source material. This will be achieved by using musically appropriate representations of musical structures. The application of databases will be investigated since they provide an efficient method of accessing data from many sources. The system should enable extension to include novel applications. For example, the system should be capable of representing music which use different notation schemes and tuning systems. The system should be able to communicate with existing music representation systems. The use of XML will be investigated as a way to provide compatibility with existing and future representation schemes.
Related Projects
Performance Analysis of Chopin's Bb minor sonata by JenniferMacRitchie
PML (Performance Markup Language) by DouglasMcGilvray
- ["MGF"] (Music and Gesture File) - a file format for the transfer of music and performance data
Publications
Workflow for the Representation of Musical Performance (Technical Note) pdf
Music And Gesture File: Performance Visualisation, Analysis, Storage And Exchange - StuartPullinger, DouglasMcGilvray, NickBailey. Forthcoming at ICMC 2008.
ICMC 2007
I attended the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 2007 to take part in the Gesture Format panel discussion. Details of the discussion and its conclusions can be found here.