THE DESCRIPTION OF MUSIC IN THE AGE OF COMPUTING
Production, reproduction and representation of music
Music digitization includes different aspects of music creation and production and at the least scores, graphic materials and performances. Elements like sheet music, even when they are the product of computer assisted composition, and other physical objects do not last for ever. That is why digitization technologies are very useful: they produce information for different types of music producers, be it publishers, record labels or media, and all of them can exploit that information.
Musical information is communicated through files that are delivered in different electronic formats like MusicXML or MIDI. But what is, actually, musical communication? What can be transmitted is a set of ideas that a composer has translated into symbols. Or it can be a performance of these musical ideas. To be read, such musical features must be transmitted through specific encoding formats that are separated. No format can describe the data and metadata of musical pieces at the same time. Anyhow, it is easy to understand that computer files’ function is to create representations of music that can be shared between several users.
Types of musical information
Whatever the format to share is, musical information can be notational (the music notes in a sheet music for instance), structural (indicating relationships between musical objects), related to performance (executing a musical piece) or to sound (for digital recordings). That information can be used for different purposes, including cataloguing, teaching, engraving or arranging an existing composition. How is, for instance, a MusicXML file constructed? It has a hierarchical structure, like sheet music, which is made up of pages, systems, staves, measures and notes and symbols. The representation of certain instruments requires more care than others.
Besides strictly musical information, musical metadata cannot be described as musical events. Metadata are massively used in the framework of music information retrieval and classification. They include general layers that point towards files that do not represent music but that provide further information related to the origin of the music, like names of composers and performers, year of creation, genre, owners (music publishers and labels), etc. In brief, metadata are pieces of cultural information presenting the contexts in which a specific piece of music was created. Sometimes, they include images.
That is to say that musical metadata are an important source of revenue, now that the music industry has entered the digital era. And as numerous streaming platforms exist and as a lot of music labels have to publish it on many of them, the extraction of these metadata must be easy and fast so that they can be published online, shared with streaming platforms by individual composers and music corporations. Music streaming sites are platforms developed by programmers. And other platforms are created by other programmers to implement musical data and metadata everywhere quickly, whether they are proprietary or open.