The GUIDO Notation Format: A Novel Approach for Adequately Representing Score-Level Music

GUIDO Music Notation is a novel approach for adequately representing score-level music. Based on a simple, yet powerful and easily extensible formalism, GUIDO is realised as a plain-text, human-readable and platform independent format. The key feature of our design is representational adequacy: simple musical concepts can be expressed in a simple way, while complex musical notions may require more complex representations. GUIDO Notation can be used for a broad range of applications, including notation software, compositional and analytical systems and tools, music databases, and music on the WWW. Introduction and Background The GUIDO Music Notation Format is a novel, general purpose formal language for representing score level music in a platform independent, plain-text and human-readable way. The GUIDO design concentrates on general musical concepts (as opposed to only notational, i.e., graphical features). Its key feature is representational adequacy, meaning that simple musical concepts should be represented in a simple way and only complex notions should require complex representations. The GUIDO design is organised in three layers: Basic, Advanced, and Extended GUIDO Music Notation. Basic GUIDO introduces the basic GUIDO syntactical structures and covers basic musical notions; Advanced GUIDO extends this layer to support exact score formatting and more sophisticated musical concepts; and Extended GUIDO introduces features which are beyond conventional music notation. GUIDO Music Notation is designed as a exible and easily extensible open standard. Thus, it can be easily adapted and customised to cover specialised musical concepts as might be required in the context of research projects in computational musicology. GUIDO has not been developed with a particular application in mind but to provide an adequate representation formalism for score-level music over a broad range of applications. The intended application areas include notation software, compositional and analytical systems and tools, musical databases, performance systems, and music on the WWW. Comparing GUIDO to other music representation formalisms, several di erences can be found: Unlike the MIDI File Format [Hewlett, Selfridge 1997] or NIFF [Grande, Belkin; 1996], GUIDO is a plain-text, human-readable format. This facilitates the realisation of GUIDO support for music software and has considerable advantages for using GUIDO to interchange musical data between applications or across platforms and over the internet. Compared to other plain-text approaches like DARMS [Selfridge; 1997], SMDL [Sloan; 1997], or music representations based on HTML or XML, GUIDO shows improved representational adequacy (in the sense de ned above) which again facilitates its usage and implementation. Finally, in contrast to representations which are speci cally designed for graphic music notation, like Common Music Notation (cmn) [Schottstaedt; 1997], the GUIDO design is focussed on musical information, while also supporting exact score formatting features. Therefore, we believe that GUIDO is equally well suited for score setting and other music applications. In this respect, GUIDO follows a similar goal to DARMS, which was used for a wide range of applications until the early 1980s. Corresponding author. yFachbereich Informatik, Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Alexanderstr. 10, D-64283 Darmstadt, Germany, Email: fhoos,renz,kiliang@iti.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de, http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/SALIERI School of Music, University of British Columbia, 6361 Memorial Road, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada, Email: hamel@unixg.ubc.ca GUIDO Music Notation is named after Guido d'Arezzo (ca. 992-1050), a renowned music theorist of his time and important contributor to today's conventional musical notation. His achievements include the perfection of the sta system for music notation and the invention of solmisation (solfege).